The prime minister also seems to have underestimated the degree to which the United States, the European Union and other interested bystanders are watching every move in his contorted quest for \”peace with security\” — and increasingly concluding that the Palestinians are right to suspect him.
May 1998. Israel turned 50. The weather has beenfabulous. We got a new dog. Otherwise, things are morecomplicated.
Beit Shalom is a newly minted coalition of 16American Jewish groups \”dedicated to the advancement of peace andreligious pluralism in Israel.\”
A nationally prominent Orthodox spokesman calls Monica Lewinsky \”a modern-day Queen Esther,\” only half-kidding. A Northeastern Chabad rabbi says, deadpan, that Lewinsky was \”sent by God.\”
For four millenia, the Jewish homeland has survived either as dream or reality. A nomadic tribe began migrating into the Land of Canaan in the early second millenium B.C.E. Their history of wandering, exodus and eventual conquest of Canaan, which they renamed Israel, forms the core story of the Bible.
Today it is rapidlybecoming clear that Israel has atomized into a number of \”tribes\” –Sephardim, Russians, Ethiopians, ultra-Orthodox, national Orthodoxand secular Ashkenazim.
He is our first forefather, the progenitor of the Covenant, and, yet, we do not call ourselves B\’nai Avraham, the children of Abraham.
Even without the immediacy of the telephone, the fear, wearinessand anguish that Israelis are feeling is as close to us as thenightly newscast or the morning paper.
As Israel nears its 50th birthday, events have shifted attentionaway from the stalled peace talks. What dominates the headlines nowis the warlike rhetoric among Jewish factions — both within Israeland in the Diaspora — as they clash over the issue of religiouspluralism.
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