This year\’s annual Anti-Zionism Week on the UCLA campus saw some of the usual rhetoric: \”Zionist oppressors. Israel is an apartheid state. Jewish racism is killing Arabs. Palestinian refugee camps equal Nazi concentration camps.\”
Six months into the Palestinian uprising, Israeli doves and hawks are displaying a rare unity in the face of repeated Palestinian onslaughts.
A time for peace and a time for war. Most talk, for years, has been about peace, but there\’s war talk in Israel now. At least one independent intelligence agency is predicting a regional war this spring, and nobody is offering credible deniability. The Palestinians have been smuggling weapons into the country — mortars, anti-tank weapons, heavy machine guns, who knows what else. The stuff comes into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt or sneaked past Israeli naval patrols along the coast. It\’s not Jordan they\’re gunning for, at least not to start.
As you might imagine, living in Israel right now feels schizophrenic. We continue with our regular lives — going to work, eating dinner, shopping, praying, catching a movie — and meanwhile, not far away, our soldiers are at war. The newspapers appear, the soccer games go on, people chat over coffee in the cafes, and the war goes on and threatens to get bigger. The most abnormal thing about it may be that one begins to accept it as normal.
Amidst a sea of Israeli and American flags and elongated balloons decorated with the Star of David, more than 1,000 Israeli residents of Los Angeles rallied in front of the Federal Building in Westwood on Oct. 15 to demonstrate support for their native country in the face of heightened violence and confrontations.
In less than a week, whatever was left of the mutual trust between Israelis and Palestinians appeared to come tumbling down.
Several months ago, I happened to be present when Yoram Ben Ze\’ev, Israel\’s ConsulGeneral in Los Angeles, addressed a local group at the Jewish Federation offices on Wilshire Boulevard. The talk, of course, was about politics: the conversion bill, the peace process, Israel andAmerica — the standard fare.\n\n
For the record, the Netanyahu administration is expecting business as usual from President Clinton, despite his troubles with the likes of Monica Lewinsky.
On Salah a-Din Street, the main street on the Arab side of the capital, the spirit was very different. People kept their heads down,aware that they were being watched, aware that the Jews weren\’t too fond of them these days. But if they were expected to feel remorseful about Mahane Yehuda, some did, while others felt roughly the opposite.
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