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High Anxiety

The concerns that keep Americans away compel Israelis to stay home as well.
[additional-authors]
July 12, 2001

There’s nothing like a trip to Israel to remind you that as bad as things sometimes seem from afar, they can look even worse close-up.

When you visit a popular tourist site and realize that there is not another visitor in the entire place — not a single one — the debacle becomes clear.

"They say tourism is down 50 percent," an Israeli whose best friend, a tour guide, has been unemployed for six months, told me. "But I’d say it’s more like 90."

My family and I just returned from spending a little more than a week in Israel, and I have the snapshots to back up the assertion: my son in the normally tourist-choked entryway to the wonderful Akko citadel, standing alone; my wife walking across the ordinarily tour group-filled amphitheater at Zippori, by herself; my daughter racing about on the observation deck of the Tower of David museum in Jerusalem, where last year people waited an hour in the summer sun to enter. Not another soul around.

The concerns that keep Americans away compel Israelis to stay home as well. Many of our Israeli friends were astounded that we went to the Old City, or downtown Jerusalem, for that matter. "Special Discounts to Tourists Brave Enough to Come to Israel," read a hand-scrawled sign in a Ben Yehuda Street shop window. In a shop nearby, T-shirts read, "I Survived Intifada 2001."

Then again, as a visit to Israel reminds you, tourism isn’t really the country’s biggest problem. It’s the economy. It’s the water shortage. It’s the nagging sense of endangerment. It’s the feeling Israelis have that before things get better, as Noel Coward liked to hum, they are bound to get worse.

In Jerusalem, we met up with our friends Dina and Mati, who live in Efrat, on the West Bank. We met on the Sherover Promenade, overlooking the city. The cafe there was shuttered (truth is, it was always overpriced and underwhelming), the scenic walkway deserted. I asked Dina how her four children, between the ages of 4 and 12, dealt with the ongoing conflict. "A few days ago my 7-year-old got really angry at me and said, ‘I hope a sniper gets you on the road home!’ It didn’t surprise me that she was so angry, but I didn’t expect her to be so specific.

"We’re not even arguing politics anymore,’ Dina continued. "Peace Now, Sharon, Beilin. There’s nothing left to argue about."

On a peaceful hillside overlooking a Galilee valley, an American friend who immigrated to Israel a few years ago puts a finer point on post-intifada ideology. “My basic opinion about the need for compromise hasn’t changed,” she said. "Ultimately, it’s where we have to get to. But I just don’t see it happening for a while."

If you hear high anxiety in such pronouncements, you’ve gauged the mood in Israel accurately enough. As we left, the papers and airwaves were filled with foreboding. Outgoing U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk defended Oslo and the inevitability of returning to the bargaining table, but didn’t see it happening anytime soon. Sharon’s more hawkish ministers rattled for war. Commentators wondered if Sharon’s much-praised restraint wasn’t part of a larger strategy to secure international support for an imminent invasion into Palestinian-controlled territory.

On the plane ride back, I finally got around to reading John Keegan’s "A History of Warfare" (Vintage Books, 1994). It is a detailed refutation of von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of policy by other means. Keegan provides plenty of examples of cultures and nations that have engaged in conflicts leading to their own destruction — surely the opposite of politics. "There are places in the world," he writes, "riven by communal rancor … where the war of all against all already confronts us. It teaches us … to what afflictions war may subject us when we refuse to … recognize that politics leading to war are a poisonous intoxication."

And yet, blame and explanation aside, that is where Israel is now, closer to this awful brink.

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