Our weekend began with a reminder of Jewish history.
There was a small gathering at the cemetery to remember Like Roos, a distant relative of Varda. She was a good friend, curious and willing to argue, but reluctant to get too close. The others who gathered at her grave, and then for coffee afterwards, may have been able to give and receive more than we due to shared experiences of a European childhood at a bad time. Two of them, like Like, found refuge with Christian families in Holland. One spoke of a friend who was passed from family to family 18 times. Another was orphaned in Poland at the age of one, did not say how she spent the war, but told of being adopted in Philadelphia. Yet another was sent by the kinder transport to Wales.
The police were preparing for massive demonstrations in Jerusalem and Nazareth, where Palestinians would declare Jerusalem as their cultural capital. The event could be harmless, or the organizers and the police could make it ugly. "Cultural capital" sounds like a nationalist euphemism for something grander. Events would begin at 5:30 PM on Saturday, with dignitaries from Tunisia and the Gulf States. Plans were to fly the Palestinian flag on the Noble Sanctuary, which Jews call the Temple Mount. There would be protests about the municipality's intention to destroy homes built illegally on public land, and the home of a bulldozer terrorist who killed Jerusalemites some months ago.
Not much happened, suggesting that the Palestinians were showing their incompetence, or their unwillingness to do more than remind the world of their existence. Crowds gathered in Bethlehem and Ramallah. There were more police than demonstrators in Jerusalem. They did nothing other than block streets and arrest 12 Palestinians who would not desist.
A Jewish demonstration got underway two hours later after the Sabbath, at the tent across the street from the prime minister's residence where the Schalit family marked 1,000 days of Gilad's captivity. His father called on Ehud Olmert to do what is necessary to free Gilad during his remaining time in office. A well know author was more forceful. He accused the prime minister of indifference and ineptitude. A woman demanded that Israel look after its soldiers. She threatened that the next generation of recruits would punish the country by their inactions if it did not bring all of its soldiers home. The Schalits.left the tent, but said they would continue the pressure from their home in the Galilee.
The Schalits attracted prime time from the media, but no more than two or three hundred participants.
The standard used to compare demonstrations is the gathering of 400,000 who protested the massacres of Palestinians of Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Even though it was Christian Lebanese militias that did the killings, a Israeli Committee of Inquiry concluded that Ariel Sharon had indirect responsibility for not anticipating and preventing them, and could no longer serve as Defense Minister.
The news later in the evening was a car bomb exploding at a shopping mall in Haifa. The car had parked outside the mall, without passing through an inspection of cars going inside. Fortunately the explosion occurred in only one of several packets that the police found during three hours of disarming what remained. An Arab organization calling itself Free the Galilee claimed credit, and promised something more successful.
On the same broadcast was news of a crises in the Labor Party. Labor was dominant from before the establishment of the state until the election of 1977. It returned to power in the elections of 1992 and 1999, and filled senior positions in the current government. The party won 56 seats in its most successful election, in 1969. It declined to 26 seats in 1999, 19 seats in the elections of 2003 and 2006, and 13 seats in 2009.
Ehud Barak, who is party leader and Defense Minister wants to bring Labor into the government being formed by Benyamin Netanyahu. The left wing of the party is strongly opposed to serving with Netanyahu, Lieberman, and the ultra-Orthodox. Some members are threatening to withdraw and create a Social Democratic Party if Barak wins the votes necessary to bring Labor into Netanyahu's government. If Barak loses the party vote, he may walk away and join Netanyahu as a Defense Minister without party affiliation.
Holocaust, Palestinians, and quarrels about how to deal with them and ourselves are central to the Israeli experience. Sometimes they are in the background, but never far away.
Ira Sharkansky (Emeritus)
Department of Political Science
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel
Tel: +972-2-532-2725
email: msira@mscc.huji.ac.il