All in all, in Avishai’s vision, Israel is a deeply flawed democracy twisted by special laws favoring Conservative religious Jews and Judaism, by racism and segregation, by the Law of Return, by a labyrinthine separatist wall, by an ethnocentric national anthem and a Davidic flag, and by other grievous offenses to Palestinian Arabs.
In his book, Avishai collects his petitions and amasses his complaints from the usual trio of eminent Israeli writers: Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, and David Grossman. But he adds a variety of Palestinian Arab, Arab Israeli, and Christian Arab vendors of politically blighted belletristic angst, all seeking — with suitable ironic glosses and abraded sensibilities — to blame Israel first for a failure to achieve Peace Now.
The general posture of all these Israeli cosmopolitans is a belief that the conflict in the Mideast is somehow the fault of the Jews, who are too religious and too xenophobic and insufficiently democratic, tolerant, pacific, idealistic, sensitive, sacrificial, and visionary to negotiate a satisfactory peace.
Knowing that in general capitalism does not work amid violence, Avishai contends that the prime supporters of Peace Now should be venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. And indeed, like Shaul Olmert, many of them are. Avishai’s prime source is none other than Dov Frohman, the inspired inventor and Intel executive whom we have met before. Now he fears that his proud new Intel Fab 18 at Kiryat Gat in the southern Israeli desert will be exposed to attack from the latest generation of rockets in Gaza.
Frohman has long been one of my heroes. He was the pioneering entrepreneur in Israel. But he now lives in the Dolomite mountains in northern Italy for much of the year and has absorbed the syndrome of Euro-pessimism about Israel.
“The vital signs seem okay,” Frohman tells Avishai, “but we are really in the dumps, socially, morally, culturally, everything. This is a drugged democracy, which is worse than a dictatorship, because in a dictatorship you try to rebel — and in this place you don’t do anything. We need some kind of catalyst to get people to the streets. We need to start talking about social issues — and without the generals doing the talking.”
That will do it, I thought. That’s just what Israel needs to rev up its economy and impress the jihad: more street protests and more prattle about “social issues.”
Frohman is glum even about the technologies he pioneered — which brought me to Israel — and are attracting entrepreneurs and investors from around the world. Told that Bibi Netanyahu deems Israel’s increasing lead in technology as a durable basis of national strength, Frohman retorts: “This is bullshit. Bullshit. Investors will not come to us in a big way unless there is political stability… What Bibi says is demagoguery. He’s done some of the right things, which in a healthy environment would have been pretty good. But before these policies can have an impact, we’ll have more violence.”
Frohman disparages the surge of investment in Israel during the first decade of the new century. “There is a lot of financial type of investment but little production type of investment — these are investments which can be taken out at will. And in the meantime, we are losing our reputation as a place for global companies to pioneer.”
He asks Avishai: “What will make our entrepreneurs want to stay in Israel, if they don’t have quality of life? There is continuous movement of people, they will want to stay elsewhere… But the really critical thing is keeping our young people here. I don’t need to do a poll to know that 50 percent of the young people would go.”
Frohman and Avishai have absorbed the Peace Now mantra and message that Israel has become an aggressive and even imperialist power. They don’t like the Orthodox religious forces in Israel that are the hope of the future demographically, the quarter of the population that bears most of its children. They don’t like the politics with its multiple parties and interest groups. They don’t like the culture that derided Dana Olmert’s gay pride and resisted a planned march of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transgenders, and multicult singularities down by the Western Wall. They believe that both the gays and the Palestinians are essentially moral and right in their claims. If the Arabs take over Jerusalem, it may become less gay in the Old City, but the Olmerts will be long gone, and Avishai will be tending his garden in Wilmot, New Hampshire. All these Israeli dissidents can justify their multiple-passport lives by echoing the angst of the novelist protestors such as Amos Oz, who puts it as bluntly as any anti-Semite: “We’re the Cossacks now, and the Arabs are the victims of the pogroms, yes, every day, every hour.”
Is there something about novelists and intellectuals that makes them incapable of grasping the reality of enemies that want to destroy your country and you, enemies contemptuous of all your legal nuances, literary apercus, civil-liberties refinements, Booker Prizes, and generous globalist poses? Oz, Grossman, and A. B. (“Bulli”) Yehoshua, all proud advocates of Peace Now, all want to give up the land of others — settlers — for what is called “peace.”
It has long appeared to be a plausible strategy, upheld by each successive Israeli and U.S. administration and by many sophisticated observers and activist experts blind to the obduracy of Israel’s opponents. Israel took land from the Palestinian Arabs in the wars of 1948 and 1967. “Now it is time to relinquish it for peace.”
It makes sense. Why not Peace Now? Shalom Achshav.
In the end, Shaul and Dana won their debate with their father. Once assertive about Israel’s right to settle in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, Ehud Olmert concluded that because of the demographic trends, Arabs would come to dominate any Israeli state that included the territories. He became the single Israeli prime minister most avidly committed to achieving peace with the Palestinians, Syria, and Lebanon. He supported the withdrawal from Gaza and the removal of some 25,000 Jewish settlers from there. In secret negotiations in 2008 with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority’s president, he offered to withdraw from the territories, divide Jerusalem, and give scores of thousands of Palestinians the “right to return” to Israel. He declared the West Bank settlements illegal, attempted to uproot several of them, and was willing to remove all of them, a quarter-million people.
In this pursuit, he gained the support of the Bush administration, which could hardly be more pro-Israel than the Israeli government was. Bush dispatched Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region sixteen times in 21 months to bring about peace and to arrange peace talks at Annapolis.
The conventional wisdom is that Olmert, Rice, and Bush were unlucky or maladroit in their negotiating tactics. Experts declared it “ironic” that Olmert, this ardent pursuer of Peace Now, found himself fighting two wars, one in 2006 with Hezbollah, and one in 2008 and 2009 with Hamas in Gaza. Following the withdrawal from Gaza, Israel won no plaudits or support from the international community and no respite from attacks. Since 2001, Hamas and its allies have targeted towns in southern Israel with more than four thousand rockets and thousands of mortar shells. After Israel withdrew entirely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005, rocket attacks increased fivefold.