Back from Israel

Early on the morning of April 30, 2003, two terrorist bombers, who had crossed into Israel using British passports by catching a ride with a credentialed Italian journalist, tried to enter Mike's Place, a popular nightclub near the American Embassy and just across the street from the beach in Tel Aviv. The standard eclectic group that frequented Mike's Place - out-of-towners, embassy staff, and a loyal group of regulars - were enjoying the bar's weekly jam session and many were out on the sidewalk trying to catch their breath. The club looks out onto the Mediterranean, and the line between inside the bar and outside of it is intentionally blurred, adding to the welcoming atmosphere and affirming the beachfront location.

Among those wounded in the blast was Avi Tabib. Avi was not only a member of the "Mike's Place family," a phrase and idea that certainly existed prior to April 30th, but which also has much greater currency since then, he was also a security guard for the bar. On April 30th, when he noticed something suspicious, he wrestled the corpulent terrorist, Asif Hanif, who was a British citizen but a Pakistani native, to the ground. Hanif's Hamas-provided explosive went off, and while the result was tragic, Avi Tabib's heroism surely saved countless casualties. Just a few weeks later, Avi Tabib returned to Mike's Place (for the website go to http://www.mikesplacebars.com/) and rejoined the family.

Mike's Place presents as good a starting point as any for someone trying to understand the sense of craziness and hope and tragedy and optimism and paranoia and faith and loss and love and good and evil that marks day-to-day life in Israel today. Just a month after the attack, three weeks after the reopening of the bar (Israel has a strict policy of rebuilding the sites of terrorist attacks as soon as possible, an emphatic show of defiance to those who think that the Israeli people will succumb to the murderers within their midst), I sat with a group of colleagues at one of the picnic tables of Mike's Place that front the nearby street and look out over the horizon of the Mediterranean Sea. In fact most of us returned to Mike's Place more than once, caught up in the conviviality of the place, in the high-spiritedness of the staff, and the free-flowing libations.

I was in Israel on a fellowship from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a Washington, DC-based organization that emerged in the wake of September 11th with the hopes of fighting terrorism through a range of means, not the least of these being through education. We were the first group of academic fellows - 19 college, university and professional school professors from across the United States plus one journalist - and we went to participate in a comprehensive seminar on terrorism, but also to get as much hands-on access as possible. And so our seemingly creepy voyeurism-cum-solidarity trip to Mike's Place was firmly in keeping with the mission of the trip.

In the weeks since the Mike's Place bombing, the Middle East and Israel are once again front-and-center in the global political discussion. In part this was probably inevitable once the American military started rolling into Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein, hopefully to restore democracy, and maybe to cleanse that pariah state of Weapons of Mass Destruction that may or may not be there. But in the end, long after the festering sore of Iraq scabs over (it may never heal) the epicenter of global focus in this stark region of the globe will be the tiny strip of land that is Israel, land made slightly larger, but still tiny, in the wake of the Six Day War of 1967. (Although as one of the speakers who came to us at Tel Aviv University reminded us, for the Palestinians and Arabs, who embraced Abdul Nasser's proclamation from Egypt that Israel was going to be wiped off the face of the planet, "Six Day War" is a rather humiliating name; they much prefer to call it the "1967 War." Naturally.)

We had amazing access to political, military, intelligence, and police officials on our trip, not to mention some of the premier scholars of terrorism, Israel and the Middle East in a part of the world where such scholarship is far more than merely academic. One of the more impressive meetings that we had was a briefing in the Prime Minister's Office for which Sharon's people rolled out the proverbial red carpet. The most remarkable aspect of this briefing was that it happened on the day that Sharon was meeting with Mahmoud Abbas/Abu Mazen prior to their important talks with President Bush. This happened on May 29. In the midst of preparations for this meeting, which occurred just days after Sharon had secured (by a 12-7 vote with four face-saving abstentions) his cabinet's support for the Roadmap, and Sharon's subsequent seeming concession that perpetual "Occupation" of the 3.5 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank was simply untenable.
And so this was the situation on the ground when we had our briefing with several of Sharon's main advisors. There were the 20 fellows, the FDD support staff, several members of the media, and a table set up in the front with microphones. Over the course of an hour and a half we received briefings from Ami Orkaby, the Advisor to the Government Secretary, Ephraim HaLevi, Advisor to the Prime Minister for National Security, Major General Yoav Gallant, Military Secretary to the Prime Minister, Dr. Raanan Gissen, Foreign Press and Public Affairs Minister to the Prime Minister (you've seen him on CNN - a lot), and Arthur Lank, a legal advisor to the Prime Minister. Halfway through his presentation to us, Major General Gallant was summoned from our meeting to confer with Sharon. It was that sort of setting.

That meeting, like many that we had with military, police and intelligence officials throughout our trip, came with a healthy dose of spin doctoring. Even the most ardently pro-Israel among our group had to be well aware of the fact that the Israeli government saw us as opinion makers, and as an opportunity to develop something that is fairly rare in those parts - good publicity for the Israeli cause. To my knowledge, everyone in the group was "pro-Israel," defined broadly, and we all, liberal or conservative, hawk or, well, semi-hawk (there were no doves in the group that I know of) thought of that as a good and necessary thing. We all went prepared to engage in the hard questions of terrorism and to bring that experience back not only to our writing, to op-ed columns and television interviews, but also into the far less receptive atmosphere of our college campuses. In any case, even in the midst of the varying levels of spin that we received, I think we learned, or had reinforced, a number of truths.

First among these truths is that, whatever the impression of Israel as an uncaring state bound and determined to subjugate the Palestinians within its midst, the fact is that unlike any other state in the Middle East, Israel is and considers itself to be a liberal democracy. And as such, Israel as a state is constrained in what it can do. Furthermore, Israel, whatever its imperfections when it comes to its Arab minority, provides more liberty for those citizens than any state in the Middle East does. The State of Israel is a secular democracy, but the fact remains that even in military and police circles officials not only talked the talk about Israel's political system, they also showed us how they walked the walk. That is vitally important. There are plenty of things for which Israel can be criticized. Crucially, however, within Israel, a land with remarkable diversity of opinion for a state nearly constantly under siege, all of these criticisms are levied - not only from the Arab minority, but also from a whole political spectrum of Israeli Jews. Would that any of Israel's neighbors show any of the same commitment to free speech. Compare Israel with Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, or even Jordan, and then say with a straight face that Israel somehow fails its citizens.

Second among these is that more and more Israelis realize that whatever the merit of the explosive term "Occupation," the Israeli involvement in Gaza and especially West Bank must change. There are those on the right who refuse to concede their historic claim to Judea and Samaria, the ancient names for the territory of the West Bank (and a sure fire way to determine someone's politics is how they refer to that contested land) but on the whole, more and more Israelis believe that the time has come when a Palestinian State is inevitable, and that state is going to involve conceding parts or all of the West Bank, including the highly contentious areas of the Jewish settlements.

Third, however, among the truths that we learned from the highest ranks of Israelis across a relatively (though not universally) broad political spectrum is that this recognition of change does not change one basic fact. Israel too often has followed the chimera of pursuing peace in the hope that with peace would come security. No more. Since the declaration of the latest intifada in September 2000, the radical fundamentalists have escalated their suicide attacks. Almost every single one of these attacks has come from the porous borders in the West Bank, and not from the secured, fenced, easily monitored borders of Gaza. Until there is security, Israelis know that they will have to live in fear. And fear will undermine the peace. Therefore, before Israel is going to make concessions, it must have assurances that the terrorism will stop. If the terrorism does not stop, they will have to continue to take whatever steps are available to them to keep radical murderers from killing innocent civilians. And let there be no doubt - suicide bombers are not martyrs, they are not heroes, they are not merely using the only weapons at their disposal. They are targeting innocent children, women and men and they are killing them. This means that until their communities stop providing cover and support and infrastructure for terrorists, they are going to pay a tremendous price at the hands of the Israeli Defense Forces and the police apparatus. This may sound callous. It is not. Stop murdering and stop supporting murderers. When it is clear that this is happening, in massive numbers the Israelis will be more than happy to get out of the territories. Until then, the IDF is going to do what it takes to protect its beleaguered people.

Fourth: Israel has the right to exist as a secular democratic state. There are those who use the term "theocracy" to refer to Israel. People who do this reveal a peculiar misunderstanding of both Israel and the very meaning of the term "theocracy." Overwhelmingly, Israelis do believe in the right to have a Jewish state. Their case comes less from historical claims to the ancient land than from a more recent history that coincided with their claim to an ancient land. In other words, Jews do not deserve Israel, at least in my mind, because of claims of several thousands of years, but rather for events of the last century. Let us keep in mind that the land now under such controversy was a British protectorate from World War I until 1947. After that point, the United Nations set aside an allotment of land for Israel. If anything, then, Israel is among the most legitimate nation states in the world. Further, it is a fact on the ground that Israel exists. There are lots of states whose borders exist with a lot less moral validity than Israel - consider the entire map of Africa, for example. In any case, Israel exists, and sage Israelis and others are now trying to transform that reality on the ground into a livable arrangement with their Palestinian neighbors. There is a lot of disagreement about how this will happen, and on the far right in Israel, as to whether it should happen. But what Israel will not concede is on the question of a right to Palestinian return. It will not concede to a Palestinian State only to see Palestinians go instead to the state of Israel. It will not allow the Palestinians to overwhelm them with numbers, to eradicate their state demographically where they cannot do so militarily or, more to the point, through the use of terror.

But perhaps the most important truth that I learned in Israel is that the Israelis refuse to yield to the threat that surrounds them. It is a reality in daily life in that beautiful, tough, contested, historic land that horrible things happen because they are hated. But hatred is nothing new to a people who survived the Shoah, who survived the worst of what humanity has to offer. Israelis are as horrified by bus explosions that kill seventeen people (as happened in Jerusalem last week) or at nightclubs that kill 3 (as at Mike's Place) or 21 (as at the Dolphinarium, which had a two-year commemoration of an attack on it while we were there, early in June) as any of us would be. They were devastated by the Passover bombing that killed 19 and seriously wounded, mangled, and incapacitated about fifty others, mostly elderly, at a hotel in the seaside city of Natanya. But they responded.

You see, one of the main mistakes that those who hate Israel made was to believe that they were weak, just as Osama bin Laden and others believed that the United States, with all of its affluence and leisure time and secularism, was weak in the late summer of 2001. But the Israelis are not weak. They have suffered too much. And so when Israel responded with Operation Defensive Shield after that horrible massacre as a crowd of mostly elderly people sat down to eat the meal signaling the start of Passover, it showed its resolve. When Israelis show up at shopping malls and cafes and bars, when they continue to ride the buses and celebrate their most holy holidays, they reveal to the rest of the world and especially to those who would do them harm, who would talk in hushed tones or loud pronouncements about the eradication of the State of Israel, that their democratic, secular state will not be cowed. It will not be terrorized, and it will not be defeated.

And so I come back to where this essay began, at Mike's Place in Tel Aviv. Nightly one can take the route that I took in part or in full many times during my stay in Tel Aviv., a route that follows the promenade along the Mediterranean Sea, which fronts the hotels and restaurants, the busy city street, the beach with its beautiful people wearing few clothes (and its less than beautiful people wearing, well, few clothes). You'll come to the United States Embassy, a barricaded and somewhat nondescript building, and then down another few feet on the right you'll see the sign: "Mike's Place," a "Live Music Bar." If the sun is starting to go down, you can grab a seat facing the Sea and lose yourself in the wonder of nature's beauty. And if you'll look around you'll see Israel - full of energy, beautiful, often bruised but always healing, friendly and most importantly, alive. Always alive.