2006 and 2009, A Comparison

January 2009

by Daniel E. Levenson

I am still a few days away from leaving for Israel, but as I sit here in suburban America watching the news reports on television and reading articles online, I can’t help but compare the situation in Israel in the summer of 2006 with what is happening there now. When I was there in 2005 the process of disengagement was about to begin, and there were very visible protests happening in the country. I admit that it was difficult for me to watch the news about disengagement, and to see images of Israeli police officers having to drag defiant settlers from homes, synagogues and community centers that they had literally risked their lives to create. At the same time, I genuinely thought that perhaps if Israel could withdraw completely from Gaza, that such an action might offer a new platform or angle for movement on the peace process.

Sadly, this proved not to be the case, and in addition to continued rocket fire and the subsequent hostilities with Hezbollah, Palestinian militants staged an attack on Israeli soldiers and kidnapped Gilad Shalit, who remains missing to this day, in June of 2006. Part of what makes trying to understand the events happening in Gaza and Israel right now so difficult is that with the exception of Israel, and maybe Jordan, it is very hard to discern the positions and genuine desires of the different players in the region. In the Arab Middle East, everyone has their own agenda which usually involves some combination of grabbing and/or maintaining power. Even for the national governments of countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which would most likely benefit economically from normalized relations with Israel, there are deep concerns about internal stability at home, which in turn affects diplomatic efforts, both public and private, when it comes to trying to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Trying to tease out the true motivations and likely moves of groups like Hezbollah, Al-Queda and the Muslim Brotherhood is even more difficult to do. I often wonder if there is any depth to their ideological paths beyond destroying Israel, trying to institute Sharia across the region, hating the west and fighting off rival groups. But I suppose they have their hands full with that at the moment.

While we may have come a long way from the days when Israel faced invading Arab armies in symmetric warfare, the possibility still remains, and indeed seems likely, that groups beyond Hamas and the usual alphabet soup of Palestinian terror groups, are or soon will be playing an unseen hand in attacks on Israel. Hezbollah, for one, seems eager for another fight, whether with a new round of rocket and missiles attacks from the north or in supplying weapons to Hamas. And the question of Iran looms large as well, and what role they might try to play in stoking the fires of hate and confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians. The only thing that might hold the Iranians back, it seems to me, is a desire not to squander any chances, which they run the risk of doing if they play too active or obvious a role in the current conflict, of negotiating with a new US administration when President-elect Barack Obama enters the White House later this month.

When I see news reports of protests against Israeli action around the world, I can understand on one level the reaction those protestors are having to horrifying images of death and destruction in Gaza, but at the same time I can’t help having the impression that many of these protestors are doing simply that, reacting to these images, without any real knowledge of the situation or its complexity. At the same time, it seems to me that they are also not seeing it on a more basic level, meaning, I wonder how they would react if they lived in a city where every second of the day and night they had to be alert for the sound of a siren warning them that they had 45 seconds or a minute to find shelter, as the people in Ashkelon, Sderot and Be’er Sheva now do. I would suggest that many of these protestors and arm-chair commentators seem to be caught in a cocoon of their own creation, viewing the situation through the lens of the media, without any sense of either the larger political, cultural and religious issues in play or any notion of the immediacy of the threat Israelis face on the ground every day.

The comparison I am doing now is really one of my own experiences in 2006 and what I might encounter there now, in 2009. In 2006 I was in a relatively safe place in Israel, worrying about friends in other parts of the country, but essentially following the news in the Israeli English-language press and trying to get on with life, somewhat confused by the apparent disparity between what I was seeing every day and the level of worry back in America. In 2009, as I prepare to leave for Israel, I am getting a glimpse into how Israel and its actions are being portrayed in the media here, and while I would not deny for one moment the suffering of innocent Palestinians in this current iteration of the conflict, I do feel that the threat Israel actually faces is underplayed in the American media. As friends and family have been asking me about my thoughts about the situation, I find myself giving the same reply: that it’s not a good thing, that I hope it stops soon, and that really, it’s very hard to get a sense of things from so far away. As I think about my impending departure, I maintain this position, and as I pack my bags for another trip to Jerusalem, I am already beginning to think about what this next experience will be like, and how I will write about it myself.