JERUSALEM — The 37 Bay Area residents who came here to show solidarity with the beleaguered Israeli people had no idea their visit would coincide with an eruption in Israel’s political landscape.
While meeting with Israeli leaders Tuesday, they learned that Prime Minister Ehud Barak had agreed to new elections, probably in May.
Their reaction — mixed.
Daphna Noily of Kentfield, one of the participants on the six-day trip sponsored by the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, said she was bewildered why “the Israelis would want to add a whole election campaign into the mix” at this time.
“The leadership of this country,” she said, “should be concentrating on how to get back to the negotiating table rather than who the next prime minister should be.”
Heather Harris, a San Francisco resident, said the need for new elections “shows that there isn’t enough of a national consensus to deal with the serious problems facing society both internally and externally.”
While noting that “it’s a critically difficult time to be having an election — they couldn’t pick a worse time” — she said the breakdown of the peace process “demands immediate attention and credible diplomatic positions from a government with a mandate from the people.”
Harris also mentioned the problems facing the Arab minority within Israel. “What’s happened over the last two months has brought issues of the inequality of resource allocation and what full citizenship really means for 20 percent of the population to the fore,” she said.
Leah Noher of Redwood Shores, saying that Israel is “a strong society [that] will only get better,” stressed that the “Israelis have proven that they are extremely resilient. They get tougher in times of crises…They’ve been under pressure before…Israelis will survive this, but it’s sad.”
The upheaval of the Barak government at the end of Tuesday, the group’s first full day in Israel, added even more uncertainty to a day that was full of briefings and opinions but offered little in the way of solutions.
The JCF contingent — the largest group to come to Israel from any one place since the current spate of violence broke out — spent the first part of the mission quickly absorbing the climate of despondency that has pervaded Israel during the past two months.
As attorney Mark Schickman of Berkeley put it, “I don’t think they have any better answers than we have at home, and it’s very depressing.”
Glancing at the rolling hills and adjacent Arab and Jewish settlements from the vantage point of a hill called Nebi Samuel in the West Bank, Robert Efroymson of Oakland declared, “What a mess. I don’t know how you can unscramble this omelet here.”
And Adam Pollock of San Francisco seemed to sum it up when he introduced himself at dinner Tuesday night, saying, “I’ve already changed my political leanings four times today.”
The S.F.-based group, which joined a national United Jewish Communities mission that included some East Bay residents, began Monday night with a briefing on the situation by Col. Noam Tibon.
The commander of the Brigade of Judea and Samaria, in his IDF-issued khakis, maroon beret attached to one shoulder, reiterated the point again and again that soldiers are restraining themselves to the utmost to prevent casualties.
“We try to be very careful and sensitive to human life,” he said. “It’s important to us to use force just when necessary.”
And, in fact, the colonel said, many Israelis feel that the IDF should be using more air strikes and more proactive measures to control the ongoing violence in the Palestinian territories.
Tibon was the first to enumerate several ideas that would become themes the following day:
*That the foreign media was making a bad situation worse by automatically siding with the underdog for the sake of a good picture.
*That the current unrest is nothing like the intifada of the 1980s because now the Palestinians have arms.
*That the Palestinians are deliberately sending their children to the front lines and shooting from behind them.
*That the military is showing unusual restraint in dealing with the current unrest in the Palestinian territories, which has come to be known as the “Al-Aqsa intifada.”
*That the hotels are absolutely empty, tourism as a whole is down and the visit from the group was so greatly appreciated.
Dr. Michael Franzblau of San Rafael agreed wholeheartedly with Tibon’s comments about the IDF. Franzblau, who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, said: “There is a level of intellectualism in the IDF that the U.S. Army never had. We don’t realize the level of its excellence.”
Col. Shalom Harari, adviser on Palestinian affairs to both Yitzhak Rabin and Barak, spoke about what is being called a “low-intensity conflict.” He amused the participants by peppering his speech with phrases like “ferkakta Kalishnikovs” and “happy trigger guys.”
But despite the humor, participants were not amused by the morning portion of his talk, which presented Israeli Arabs as a greater internal threat than ever before.
“Everyone who says that Israeli Arabs are not a front, send them to me,” Harari said. “The younger generation of Israeli Arabs have taken a harder line against Israel.”
While mission participants were glad to have the opportunity to show solidarity with the people of Israel, it was clear that they did not believe every word they were told. For example, while Harari made it clear that he did not mean to generalize, some found the colonel’s explanations a bit too black-and-white for their liking.
“I thought we were beyond the simplification of the ‘us verses them’ mentality,” said Rabbi Evan Goodman, spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel-Judea in San Francisco. Some of the generalizations Harari offered, Goodman said, “reminded me of what I heard when I lived here 20 years ago.”
Yet, at the same time, Goodman couldn’t help but notice the difference from his last visit. On an ARZA mission in January, the rabbis were welcomed to Ramallah, where they met with Palestinian officials. “Things have changed so drastically,” he said, “I wanted to see it with my own eyes.”
Nonetheless, a visit to a Tali school, an elementary school run by the Masorti (Conservative) movement, proved to be sobering. The school is in Gilo, the Jerusalem suburb that has been under fire nightly from Palestinian snipers using the nearby Christian Arab village of Beit Jala as a cover.
Standing directly in what becomes the line of fire after dark, the group saw the sandbags placed in apartment windows.
For Israel to capture the snipers in Beit Jala would require invading Zone A of the Palestinian Authority, meaning an area completely under Palestinian control. That would be akin to invading an Arab country, the group was told. So the residents try to live their lives as normally as they can, singing louder in their Shevet Achim synagogue to drown out the shooting.
Dorit Chasidi, a somewhat shy 11-year-old Tali school student whose house had been fired upon, said she continues to be frightened. The nightly shootings have changed her opinions about Arabs for the worse.
And Nomi Guttman-Bass, an American immigrant to Gilo, told of a group begun about five years ago of Jewish women from Gilo and Arab women from nearby Beit Safafa. They had begun a dialogue and had worked up to taking trips together.
That has come to an end, as of late. “I don’t know what to say to them now,” she said.
While the group was supposed to hear Knesset members from both the right and the left side of the spectrum, Shimon Peres made himself available at the last moment. That meant that due to time constraints, the group heard from one leftist, in the form of the former prime minister, and then from someone farther to the left, Naomi Chazan of the Meretz Party.
While Peres has not been too popular in Israel lately, after losing the largely symbolic presidency to Moshe Katsav, he seemed to be incredibly popular among San Franciscans. Receiving a standing ovation both when he entered and exited, the Nobel Peace Prize winner said Barak’s mistake at Camp David was in offering too much as a final agreement.
When asked what he would have done differently had he been in Barak’s place, he said, “I would have left the refugee problem and Jerusalem for later. Barak tried to solve it all at once.”
Peres could not leave the room without many visitors extending their hands. “You’re one of the great leaders of Israel,” Schickman told him.
Discussing the Israeli-Palestinian confrontation, Chazan said she did not want to talk about “who started it and how.”
Those “who advocate a military solution are being totally irresponsible and are risking the state of Israel,” she said. “There is no military solution to a guerrilla war.”
Moments after Barak had agreed on television to hold new elections, Hirsch Goodman, former editor of the Jerusalem Report and Jerusalem Post, expressed his concerns during dinner. He lamented that a government could be in such disarray at a time of such political conflict. The man Goodman had wholeheartedly backed for prime minister had “managed to antagonize everyone.”
At the end of the first day and a half, John Goldman, JCF president, said that, of course, seeing the places in person offered an added perspective. “Yet, it is utterly confounding…I’m struck by this fatalistic sense that this crisis is not going to be easily solved.”
Nevertheless, Gene Kaufman executive director of Sinai Memorial Chapel in San Francisco, said, “In spite of all the difficulties, there is still this hope for peace. No one here said that peace is hopeless, and that’s so important.”