Sleeping amid the noise
By Gideon Samet
Haaretz, December 17, 2004
Israelis are half asleep at a time when something is happening here that many see as an exciting turning point in the regional situation. Perhaps the local audience knows something that all the others are unaware of. They are sleeping because they have old familiar reasons for skepticism toward most of the leaders they have known. One, who now wants to return to the leadership, went to the Palestinians with proposals a few years ago, and returned with the irresponsible claim that there is nobody to talk to. Another, who also has a burning desire to make a comeback, is shooting at anything that moves with any sign of political compromise. The present leader, who will remain for a long time yet, is the architect of most of the expectations. But the nation has learned to wait and see to what extent the prophet Jeremiah's question was correct: Will a black person change his skin, and a leopard his spots? With all that, the nation's drowsiness has become a national danger.
The passivity of the Israelis is dangerous because there are indeed signs of a possible change between us and the Palestinians, and therefore in the state of the country as well. The majority is still registered as supporting far-reaching compromises for the sake of an agreement. But this majority doesn't show any signs of discomfort when year after year its government does everything possible to destroy such a possibility. Until he died, Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat was the villain. Now, this government will start making life miserable for the new leader. It will let him conduct the elections next month. Afterward, the sleeping nation will have to show a great deal of interest and exert considerable pressure so that the Sharon-Peres government will help Mahmoud Abbas stand on his feet.
Why is there such a slim chance that this will happen? Until they awakened, on a few rare occasions, Israelis have always been dormant. After the disaster of the Yom Kippur War, it took them three years to bring down the Labor government. After they applauded the Lebanon War, only Sabra and Chatilla brought them out into the streets. The agitation at the beginning of the previous decade under the slogan "no more corruption," was unusual. It brought about a change in the climate, for a while.
In memory of the assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, hundreds of thousands of peace lovers lit candles and sobbed until they were blind to what was going on around them. The camp that spawned the grudge against the architect of the Oslo accords was the one that won the next elections. Since then, there has been nothing even close to an awakening.
To a great extent, it was the terror attacks that prevented grass-roots pressure for an agreement with the Palestinians. No less than that, a gigantic denial mechanism was in operation. The majority wrote on paper, as on ice, its abstract desire for a change in the national policy. At the polls, as on concrete, it engraved its support for a right-wing coalition.
Now there is new fuel for the mechanism of repression. The disengagement initiative is the thin thread on which the public is hanging its feeble desire for change. It is very doubtful whether Ariel Sharon will carry it out in full. As written this week in these columns, his initiative exposes the political parties' lies during the negotiations for a new government. Many readers justifiably noted that Sharon himself, a man never known for outstanding credibility, is holding on to what may turn out to be the biggest bluff of all.
It's almost self-evident, judging by his history. But even one of the greatest tacticians we have ever had cannot keep up his maneuvering forever if that same skeptical public comes out of the coma into which it sank, amid the noise.
A shocking gap now exists between the potential for change in the region and the national apathy about the very great likelihood that this opportunity will be missed. The underlying reason for this non-thunderous silence is not a genuine calm, but rather despair and false patriotism. The nation finds it difficult to admit that a grossly erring leadership is dragging it to the worst places. It prefers to tell the surveys that actually, despite it all, everything is quite good, thank you. It prefers, for the sake of the illusion, not to lay a finger on those causing the crisis. If things continue this way, the snoring nation eventually will have no one to complain about but itself.
