Two Israelis made world headlines this week. In freezing Stockholm, Prof. Dan Shechtman of the Haifa Technion (Israel’s Institute of Technology) won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In sunny Perth, Australia, Lee Korzits won the gold medal at the women’s Sailing World Championships, bringing her closer to the 2012 London Olympics.
The announcement last week of the release of Gilad Shalit after being held in captivity by Hamas for more than five years was met here in Israel with mixed feelings: On the one hand, tremendous joy. And on the other hand, grave doubts about the price paid and fears about the ramifications of this deal.
The fifth anniversary of Gilad Shalit’s cruel imprisonment by Hamas, without the Red Cross being allowed to visit him, sparked growing public pressure in Israel on the government to agree to a painful prisoner swap. As I watched the protest, my mind wandered back almost four decades.
As I write these lines on May 17, the Middle East is caught between events and speeches. The events are the Arab spring, which actually started in December 2010, when a man burned himself to death in Tunisia, sparking a chain of pro-democracy uprisings all over the region; the skirmishes on the Israeli borders with Lebanon and Syria; the killing of Osama bin Laden; and the expected U.N. General Assembly motion in September, recognizing a Palestinian state. The speeches are the one President Barack Obama is delivering on May 19 (the day this newspaper appears in print) on the Middle East and North Africa, and three speeches by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: the one he gave in the Knesset on May 16, the one he will give on May 23 before the U.S. Congress, and, finally, the one he will deliver at AIPAC.
In the midst of so many uncertainties dumped on us by the dramatic demise of the Mubarak regime, one solid, crystal-clear fact emerges: The “experts” don’t know what they are talking about. The same people who now sit in television studios explaining to us what is happening in Egypt and why are the same people who three weeks ago swore that the Egyptian regime was stable. Which reminds one of the saying of Abba Eban: “It is very difficult to forecast, especially about the future.”
It was early in the morning in June 1967, during the Six Day War, when, as a young lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force, I was low-flying over the Mediterranean, approaching the coast of northern Sinai. As a kid I read the epic Enemy Coast Ahead, by Wing Commander Guy Gibson V.C., the leader of the 1943 Dambuster raid, so imagine how excited I was.
If you know this old Jewish joke, just skip it.
I have never in my life been to a shrink. The reason is that I want to leave my money to my kids, not to other people’s kids. Also, I consider myself to be absolutely normal. Nevertheless, recently I felt the urge to lie down on a couch, stop pretending that I’m in control and that I have a clue about what’s going on, and just surrender to an all-knowing, wise man, who will fix everything. I guess that the session would run as follows.
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