[THS] The Atlantic Monthly: Is Israel Finished?

[Peter Webster]

Half a step forward

By George S. Hishmeh, Special to Gulf News

Published: May 08, 2008, 00:09

http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/08/05/08/10211555.html

The May cover of The Atlantic magazine, a respected monthly, was daring.
The headline was unbelievable for an American publication: "Is Israel
Finished?" The star of David was larger than the characters on the cover
which was adorned by the four colours of the Palestinian flag - red, white,
black and green.

The author is Jeffrey Goldberg, who admits that he as "a young Zionist in
the late 1980's ... was drawn to the idea that Israel represented the most
sublime and encompassing expression of Jewishness," and so he moved
there and joined the Israeli army.

The article leads off with the rift between the discredited and beleaguered
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and a grieving novelist, David
Grossman, whose son was killed in the ill-considered Israeli war on Lebanon
in 2006. But the author says the rift in fact "mirrors the division confounding
Israel" especially whether it can "overcome its paralysis to make the hard
choice necessary for its survival ....."

In other words, can Israel, unlike Olmert, support a settlement along the
lines favoured by Grossman and two like-minded authors, Amos Oz and A.
B. Yehoshua, who all have been "longtime advocates of territorial
compromise with the Palestinians, in part for reasons of morality, and in
part because they want to protect their country's Jewish majority"?

What is eye-catching about the article is that this topic could not have been
discussed so boldly and openly at any previous time since Israel's
occupation of the Palestinian territories more than 40 years ago. Grossman
is now quoted as saying that he is ready to support Olmert "if he believed
that the prime minister was truly serious about taking the necessary steps
toward reconciliation with the Palestinians" including Hamas. Goldberg fears
that "the possibility of a two-state solution is swiftly fading" and is not
impressed by what he calls the "farce" of the Annapolis peace conference
that the Bush administration sponsored late last year.

The morass that the American Jewish community finds itself in nowadays
has, for example, contributed to the recent founding of more dovish leaders
and groups such as J Street Project and the outspokenness of others
including the Israeli Policy Forum (IPF).

Alon Ben-Meir writes in IPF Focus that "at the heart of this (Israeli)
conundrum is the occupation of Palestinian and Syrian lands, a wound that
if left unattended will produce a tragedy of a scale we have not yet
witnessed". The university professor advises that Israel "must ultimately free
itself from the albatross around its neck and relinquish these occupied
territories".

But this half a step forward does not necessarily mean that all is well and
the influential American Jewish community has become more open-minded.
Take the case of Debbie Almontaser, the Yemeni-American who was forced
to step down last August as the founding principal of the Khalil Gibran
School, New York City's first public school dedicated to the study of Arabic
language and culture. Her resignation was precipitated by the "New
McCarthyism and right-wing media attacks", as Democracy Now, a popular
liberal radio programme, put it after she was painted as an educator with a
militant Islamic agenda, some calling it "madrassa".

Lawsuit

The issue was touched off when Almontaser innocently responded to a
reporter from The New York Post to explain the word "intifada," Arabic for
"uprising" or "shaking off" which was on a T-shirt that a young girl, who
was not in the school, wore. Her failure to condemn the slogan, which the
Palestinians use to describe their uprisings against Israeli occupation,
precipitated an outcry for her ouster. She has now filed a lawsuit claiming
the Education Department has violated her right to free speech.

Coincidentally, the upcoming conference of the Middle East Studies
Association, scheduled to be held in November in Washington, DC will have
a panel to examine "Conflict, Diversity and Inclusion in Education."

A participant in the panel will submit an original attempt that explores "the
formative history of political Zionism" between 1897-1947 through poster
art. The paper, which include drafts of 12 lessons for high school students,
has been prepared by Dan Walsh of Georgetown University and will focus
on, among other subjects, the definition of "anti-Semitism" which is
currently problematic in the American lexicon.

Walsh, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, and who probably has
the world's largest collection of Palestinian posters, some 3,000 now
available on an impressive slide show has successfully used it as "an entree
point for a deeper, more nuanced discussion of contemporary Middle East
politics and history". He hopes to visit the Central Zionist Archives in Tel Aviv
in order to form "a researchable core of material on the subject" in order to
serve the goal of making contemporary Middle East Studies more accessible
and comprehensible.

George Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at
ghishmeh at gulfnews.com.





http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/israel

May 2008 Atlantic Monthly

The rift between a beleaguered prime minister and a grieving novelist
mirrors the division confounding Israel. Can the two men overcome the
differences that separate them? Can Israel overcome its paralysis to make
the hard choice necessary for its survival as a Jewish democracy?

by Jeffrey Goldberg

Unforgiven

Israel

Also see: Video: "Ideals and Ideologies—
Israel at Sixty"



Jeffrey Goldberg reflects on Israel's formative visions and current dilemmas.

Flashbacks: Prophesying Palestine

Jeffrey Goldberg looks back at a mixed bag of Atlantic predictions from the
1920s and '30s about prospects for a Jewish homeland.

In early August of 2006, four weeks after the Lebanese Shiite group
Hezbollah, which has as its goal the physical elimination of Israel (and the
ancillary ambition of murdering, whenever practicable, Jews elsewhere in
the world), killed three Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two more in a cross-
border raid, Israel found itself in an exceedingly disagreeable position. The
Hezbollah attack had prompted an immediate, and intermittently
unrestrained, Israeli military response, which included thousands of
bombing runs over Lebanon. The prime minister, the untried Ehud Olmert,
a former mayor of Jerusalem who had taken office eight months earlier,
promised to obliterate Hezbollah. In the past, Israel had destroyed far
greater enemies—the Syrian air force, the Egyptian army, the Arab
Legion—so it was assumed that Israel would make short work of Hezbollah,
a force consisting of, at most, a few thousand fighters in possession of
12,000 short-range rockets. But within days of Israel’s initial attack, it
seemed obvious that the Olmert mission was in peril. The Israeli
bombardment of Lebanon, which had resulted in the deaths of hundreds of
Hezbollah members and innocent civilians, could not stop Hezbollah’s
rockets from falling on northern Israel. These rocket attacks had killed
dozens of Israelis—Arab Israelis included—and had made the Galilee largely
uninhabitable. Thousands of Israelis became refugees in their own country,
fleeing south in search of shelter.

On August 9, Olmert’s cabinet authorized a full-scale ground invasion.
Israeli troops were already operating inside Lebanon, but in relatively
modest numbers. The generals believed that an armored sweep across
southern Lebanon could at least push Hezbollah’s rocket teams back to the
Litani River, well away from the Israeli border.

At the outset of the conflict, in July, Israelis had stood united with Olmert
against Hezbollah. Israel’s endless confrontation with the Palestinians is
shaded with ambiguities; many Israelis wish to see a Palestinian state come
into being in the West Bank and in Gaza, even as they doubt that such a
state would bring an end to terrorism. With Hezbollah, there are fewer
grays. Its sponsor, Iran, poses the most immediate threat to Israel’s
physical existence; many of its leaders are plainly anti-Semitic. Iran’s
president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Holocaust denier who has called
Israel a “filthy bacteria.” Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, has said
in a speech, “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly,
despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we
would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice, I do not say the Israeli.”

Because the Hezbollah attack was unprovoked, much of the world had
initially expressed sympathy for Israel. This took Israelis by surprise; it had
been more than 40 years since they generally received such consideration
from the international community. Even Sunni Arab leaders, who fear Shiite
radicalism more than they dislike the Jewish state, expressed irritation with
Hezbollah.

By early August, though, opinion was shifting, and the decision to launch a
ground invasion just when credible cease-fire proposals were proliferating
was controversial around the world, and even at home. This was at least
partly because Olmert, a lawyer and party functionary, and his defense
minister, a former union leader named Amir Peretz, seemed to be in over
their heads. Their actions convinced some Israelis—particularly those on the
left—that the decision to order a ground invasion revealed a kind of
unthinking aggressiveness.

On Thursday, August 10, the day after Olmert’s cabinet authorized the
invasion, Israel’s three most prominent writers, Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua,
and David Grossman, held a press conference to call for a cease-fire. This
was not an entirely marginal exercise. Writers in Israel play a role in the
moral and political life of their country that is unfamiliar to writers in the
United States. The three men were not reflexively biased against Olmert,
who, unlike his main political rival, the former Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, was something of a born-again leftist. Olmert had once been a
prince of the right-wing Likud Party. But, like his mentor and predecessor,
Ariel Sharon, Olmert had come to believe that a withdrawal from Palestinian
territory was in the urgent best interest of Israel.

Olmert’s main consideration was not moral but demographic: within the
next several years, the number of Arabs under Israeli control—there are
now more than 1.3 million Arab citizens of Israel (there are 5.4 million
Jews), and an additional 3.4 million or more Arabs who live in the West
Bank and Gaza—will be greater than the number of Jews. The Israeli
demographer Sergio DellaPergola estimates that by 2020, Jews will make up
just 47 percent of the people who live between the Jordan River and the
Mediterranean Sea.

Political parties of the left and the center see the “demographic threat” to
Israel’s Jewish majority as an existential menace nearly on a par with that
posed by Iran and its nuclear program. The demographic trend has raised
fears that Israel will become a state like pre-Mandela South Africa, in which
the minority ruled the majority. But if the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza
were given the vote, then Israel, a country whose fundamental purpose has
been to serve as a refuge for persecuted Jews, and to allow those Jews to
have the novel experience of being part of a majority, would disappear, to
be replaced by an Arab-dominated “binational” state. Yet Israel has not
found a way to escape the West Bank.

Unlike Olmert, the three writers had been longtime advocates of territorial
compromise with the Palestinians, in part for reasons of morality, and in
part because they want to protect their country’s Jewish majority. In the
days of near-hallucinatory ecstasy that followed Israel’s lopsided victory in
the Six-Day War of 1967—in which Israel took possession of Gaza and the
West Bank—Oz was one of the first Israelis to warn about the moral and
strategic consequences of military occupation, and in the late 1970s he was
a founder of the left-wing group Peace Now, which advocates Israeli
withdrawal from the West Bank. Yehoshua, who has been called the “Israeli
Faulkner” by Harold Bloom, has repeatedly urged the United States to pull
its ambassador as a “symbolic” way to protest the expansion of settlements
in the West Bank.

Grossman’s fiction, much of it haunted by the Holocaust, concerns the
durability of grief; his most accomplished novel to date, See Under: Love
(1986), is a complicated weaving of fantasy and reality that recalls the work
of Gabriel García Márquez. Grossman has been preoccupied with the
ubiquity of death in the lives of Israelis and Palestinians for many years.
Nearly a decade ago, he told an interviewer that Israeli couples “have three
children so if one of them dies, there will be two left.” Grossman made his
name internationally with a book of nonfiction prophecy, The Yellow Wind,
which he wrote (originally for an Israeli newsmagazine) in early 1987. The
Yellow Wind was an exposé of the occupation and its demoralizing effects
on Palestinians, and on the Israelis who enforced it. The book presaged the
first intifada, or uprising, which began in December of that year.

Though all three authors were advocates of compromise and believed that
Israel’s settlement enterprise in the West Bank was a catastrophe, none was
a pacifist, all were patriots, and all supported the initial retaliation against
Hezbollah. “It would have been immoral not to respond,” Yehoshua told me
later, but after the Lebanese government promised to rein in Hezbollah,
“we had to say ‘Enough.’” Grossman did much of the speaking at the press
conference that day. His main contention was that Israel had overreached
in the pursuit of self-defense. “The argument that an Israeli presence on
the Litani would prevent the firing of missiles on Israel is an illusion,” he
said. “Even the argument that we mustn’t give Hezbollah a sense of security
has been irrelevant for a long time. Hezbollah wishes to see us sink deeper
into the Lebanese swamp.”

Grossman saw in Olmert’s invasion what he called an emblematic, and
regrettable, Israeli response to terrorist threats, of a piece with Israel’s
typical response to dangers posed by Hamas in Gaza. “Now we must look 

not to the familiar, instinctive reaction of the Israeli way of fighting—that is,
what doesn’t work with force will work with much more force,” he said.
“Force, in this case, will fan the flames of hatred for Israel in the region and
the entire world, and may even, heaven forbid, create the situation that will
bring upon us the next war and push the Middle East to an all-out, regional
war.”

Olmert and Grossman

THE PRIME MINISTER AND THE NOVELIST: Ehud Olmert (left) and David
Grossman



Grossman closed the press conference without mentioning his personal
interest in the war: his 20-year-old son, Uri, was a tank commander then
fighting in Lebanon. To do so would have been unseemly, and un-Israeli,
he told me later. “The cause was to stop the war for the sake of the entire
country.”

Grossman is 54, but he is trim and his face is unlined. He is reflective and
self-contained, somewhat owlish, but not without humor. We met on a cold
day in Jerusalem, at Mishkenot Sha’ananim, an artists’ colony situated
across the Valley of Hinnom from Mount Zion.

Grossman told me that after the press conference, he went home to work
on his latest novel, which he had begun in May of 2003, when Uri, the
second of his three children, was about to be called up for army service.
Grossman’s oldest boy, Yonatan, had already completed three years in the
army.

“I thought about writing a novel about an Israeli soldier, a tank
commander, who goes to a big military operation,” he said. “His mother has
a kind of premonition that he’s going to be killed, and she will do everything
she can in order to prevent that from happening. So she escapes. She will
not be at home when the army comes to announce the death of her son.
She understands that bad news takes two people, one to deliver and one to
receive, and she will not be there to receive. She starts a walk across Israel,
a 500-kilometer walk, and she tells the story of her son’s life, from the
smallest details to the largest things, to someone who is very significant to
her. She believes that this will protect her son.”

Grossman himself took a similar journey while writing the book, spending
weeks crossing Israel on foot, and he visited with army officers whose duty
it is to inform families of the deaths of their children.

At 2:40 a.m. on Sunday, August 13, three days after the press conference,
Grossman’s doorbell rang. There were officers at the door. Uri had been
killed in action in Lebanon, in the village of Hirbat Kasif, when a Hezbollah
missile struck his tank. He was one of 24 soldiers to die on the first day of
the ground offensive. Five hours later, David and his wife, Michal, woke up
Uri’s sister, Ruti, who was then 13. As she cried, she asked, “But we will still
go on living, right?”

Yehoshua, who is close to the family, told me that the Grossmans had taken
to turning off their outside light at night, to make it more difficult for a
messenger to find the house. But on that particular night, Michal had
turned their outside light on. She later worried, she said, that in so doing
she had “invited the terrible news.”

Among the mourners to visit the next day were Oz and Yehoshua. “Maybe
he was trying to prevent Uri’s death by writing down his most terrible
fears,” Yehoshua told me. “It’s a terrible tragedy that it didn’t work.”

Grossman recalled the visit of Oz and Yehoshua the day after Uri’s death.

“When Uri fell, the morning after, they came to the shivah”—the period of
visitation and mourning that follows a Jewish burial—“and I told them I
won’t be able to save this novel. I think it was Amos who said, ‘The novel
will save you.’ The day after the shivah, I went back and started to work
again.” I asked Grossman whether the novel has changed. “The writer
changed, not the story. I knew how the story was going to end. I don’t
want to say it.” There is more sadness in the book now, he said, “sadness
for the fate of the young man, for the future of Israel, but I must say that
the small number of people who have read it say they find it comforting.”

The novel is being published this spring. It could have a seismic effect on
Israelis, who have, in their 60th year of independence, grown tired of losing
their sons to war.

The death of Uri has made his father, a man obviously vulnerable to
existential worry, preternaturally aware of the insecurity around him. The
60th anniversary of Israel’s birth—it gained independence on May 15,
1948—is meant to be a celebration, but Grossman sees darkness ahead.
“Our army is big, we have this atom bomb, but the inner feeling is of
absolute fragility, that all the time we are at the edge of the abyss.”

Israelis have violently contradictory feelings about their future. Their
country is, by almost any measure, an astonishing success. It has a large,
sophisticated, and growing economy (its gross domestic product last year
was $150 billion); the finest universities and medical centers in the Middle
East; and a main city, Tel Aviv, that is a center of art, fashion, cuisine, and
high culture spread along a beautiful Mediterranean beach. Israel has
shown itself, with notable exceptions, to be adept at self-defense, and
capable (albeit imperfectly) of protecting civil liberties during wartime. It
has become a worldwide center of Jewish learning and self-expression; its
strength has straightened the spines of Jews around the world; and, most
consequentially, it has absorbed and enfranchised millions of previously
impoverished and dispossessed Jews. Zionism may actually be the most
successful national liberation movement of the 20th century.

Yet 60 years of independence have not provided Israel with legitimacy in its
own region. Two of its neighbors, Egypt and Jordan, have signed peace
treaties with Israel, but it is still a small Jewish island in a great sea of Islam,
a religion that seems today more allergic than ever to the idea of Jewish
independence. Iran poses the most ruthless threat to Israel’s existence—no
other member of the United Nations has so insistently, and in such baroque
terms, threatened the destruction of another member state.

The internal threats to Israel’s existence are severe as well. Israel’s greatest
military victory, in 1967, led to a squalid and seemingly endless occupation,
and to the birth of a mystical, antidemocratic, and revanchist strain of
Zionism, made manifest in the settlements of the West Bank. These
settlements have undermined Israel’s international legitimacy and
demoralized moderate Palestinians. The settlers exist far outside the Israeli
political consensus, and their presence will likely help incite a third intifada.
Yet the country seems unable to confront the settlements.

Israel’s people are among the world’s most patriotic—in a recent survey, 94
percent of Jewish Israelis said they are willing to fight for their country (by
contrast, 63 percent of Americans are willing to fight for theirs), but 44
percent of Israelis said they would be ready to leave their country if they
could find a better standard of living abroad. There are already up to
40,000 Israelis in Silicon Valley (and more than a half million across the
U.S.), and the emigration of Israel’s most talented citizens is a constant
worry of Israeli leaders. “Jews know that they can land on their feet in any
corner of the world,” Ehud Barak, the defense minister and former prime
minister, told me. “The real test for us is to make Israel such an attractive
place—cutting-edge in science, education, culture, quality of life—that even
American Jewish young people want to come here. If we cannot do this,
even those who were born here will consciously decide to go to other
places. This is a real problem.”

Olmert and Grossman

UNSETTLED: Israeli citizens protest the dismantling of settlements in 2005

There are other, more disturbing issues, ones that many Israelis don’t care
to address. Uri Grossman’s death provoked in me all sorts of questions
about Israel, its purpose, its mistakes and enemies: How can Israel survive
the next 60 years in a part of the world that gives rise to groups like
Hamas? How can Israel flourish if its army cannot defeat small bands of
rocketeers? Does the concentration of so many Jews in a claustrophobically
small space in the world’s most volatile region actually undermine the
Jewish people’s ability to survive, an ability that was called into question
little more than 60 years ago, when 33 percent of the world’s Jews were
murdered? I do not think it is merely a symptom of Jewish hypochondria to
ask such questions.

Some of the questions forming in my mind were too indecent to ask a
grieving father like David Grossman. But I asked him whether he believed
that Zionism has succeeded in its mission. I framed the question
impersonally, though I had been struck by what to me was an inescapable
truth: if Uri Grossman had been born to Jews in America, rather than to
Jews in Israel, in 2006 he most likely would have been a student at Harvard
or Michigan or Stanford, rather than a commander in the Armored Corps of
the Israel Defense Forces. The underlying premise of the creation of the
state of Israel—its main mission—was to provide a refuge for the Jewish
people in their historic homeland. One of the many contradictions Israel
faces in its seventh decade of independence is this: it is a country that is
safe for Judaism, but not for Jews.

As a young Zionist in the late 1980s, I was drawn to the idea that Israel
represented the most sublime and encompassing expression of Jewishness,
so I moved there and joined its army. This decision was unfathomable to
many of my new Israeli comrades. One of my commanders asked me, “Why
would a person leave America to die in Israel?” Then he asked if we could
switch places—he would move to New York and marry a doctor’s daughter,
and I would die chasing Palestinians through the casbah of Nablus. I was
dreaming Leon Uris dreams, but he was having visions out of Goodbye,
Columbus.

I didn’t die, obviously, but his argument bothered me, and still does. The
founders of Zionism believed that a state for the Jews would cure—or at
least make irrelevant—the ancient European disease of Jew hatred. Remove
the Jew from his insalubrious and constricted life in anti-Semitic Russia and
give him a plow in Palestine, and he would become a “normal” person,
deserving, among other things, the respect of Christians. The first Zionists
had no sense that Muslims would object to the entry of thousands of Jewish
socialists—women wearing pants included—into tribal, conservative
Palestine. In his utopian novel, Altneuland—Old-New Land”—the founder of
political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, imagined an Israel much like Vienna, a
society of opera-going, German-speaking Jews who had shed their “pale,
weak, timid” natures. Herzl did not imagine a Palestine free of Arabs,
though he imagined the Arabs overjoyed by the gifts of science and
hygiene brought by the Jews. The principal Arab protagonist, Reschid Bey,
says: “The Jews have enriched us. Why should we be angry with them?
They dwell among us like brothers. Why should we not love them?”

From Atlantic Unbound:

"The Kingdom of the Spirit"

(November 1961)
"It is impossible to understand the history of the Jewish people and their
struggle for existence ... unless we bear in mind the unique idea which
their history embodies." By David Ben-Gurion

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was not unaware of Arab
hostility to the goals of Zionism. In a 1934 meeting with the Arab leader
Musa Alami, Ben-Gurion said that Zionism would “bring a blessing to the
Arabs of Palestine, and they have no good cause to oppose us.” Alami
responded, “I would prefer that the country remain impoverished and
barren for another hundred years, until we ourselves are able to develop it
on our own.” But Ben-Gurion believed that numbers would bring the cure.
He said in 1933, “In the course of four to five years we must bring in a
quarter of a million Jews and the Arab question will be solved.”

Arab opposition did not die; it hardened. This opposition has, of course,
gotten the Palestinians nothing; theirs is perhaps the least successful
national liberation movement of the 20th century. But failure has not
diminished the desire of many Muslims to see the end of Israel, and the
ultimate success of the Zionist idea depends not only on Israel’s ability to
keep its citizens alive but on its ability to end talk of its impermanence.

“I think that this fear, this idea that Israel will not exist anymore—I cannot
even utter specific, clear words because it’s really frightening—this idea or
fear hovers above us all the time,” Grossman told me. “It is so present,
even though we suppress it almost violently. Whenever it infiltrates the
consciousness, it’s almost paralyzing. You can see if you look at the
numbers—how few we are, how many they are, how hostile this region is,
how we have never been accepted into this region.”

He continued: “If you see the tendencies of fanaticism, the way in which at
every crossroads both sides almost always choose the more violent
approach, if you see the fact that other religions, parts of the West, never
really accept the idea of Israel 
 It means something deep about us (and
even more about everyone else), about Judaism and the state that we are
still in, after 60 years of sovereignty—we have not accomplished statehood,
the realization that this is a legitimate state. And we have a lack of
confidence in our own existence. We also don’t really believe in our own
existence. We have the formal symptoms of a normal state, but we still do
not believe we are a state. Throughout history we were regarded, and we
regarded ourselves, as a larger-than-life story, since the time of the Bible.
We’re a story that other nations read and borrow. But if you are a story,
you can end.”

Of course, America is sui generis in its acceptance of Jews, having brought
them to the absolute center of its national life. This means that their story
will come to an end not because of the actions of Iran, or of the
Palestinians, but because they choose to end it, by assimilating completely.

I acknowledged to Grossman that, at a time of maximum distress, the late
1930s, America refused to admit thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing from
Nazi terror (if Israel had been created in 1939, not 1948, hundreds of
thousands, if not millions, of Jews could have been saved). But the
Diaspora, and the American diaspora experience in particular, no longer
represents a danger to physical Jewish existence. Grossman steered the
conversation away from issues of mere physical security. Israel still gives a
Jew the best chance of feeling at home in the world, he said.

“Maybe if you live in other places, you are integrated, you feel assimilated. I
wouldn’t like to live in any other place. With all the difficulty and criticism I
have, it is still for me, as a Jewish person, the highest spiritual challenge
and endeavor to see this country become a better place.”

Uri Grossman’s death became a national trauma amid the larger national
trauma of the Lebanon misadventure. Grossman remained silent about the
war, and about politics, from his son’s death, in August, until that
November, when he addressed 100,000 Israelis at a memorial service for
Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister assassinated in 1995 by an extremist
supporter of the settlements. Olmert was on the stage as well; Grossman
refused to shake hands with the prime minister, but he directed his words
at him.

“The death of young people is a horrible, shattering waste,” he said. “But
no less dreadful is the sense that for many years, the state of Israel has
been squandering not only the lives of its children but also the miracle it
experienced—the great and rare opportunity bestowed upon it by history,
the opportunity to create an enlightened, decent, democratic state that
would conduct itself according to Jewish and universal values. A state that
would be a national home and a refuge, but not only a refuge; rather, a
place that would also give new meaning to Jewish existence.”

He went on to criticize the country’s leaders, saying that they could not
“help a nation adrift in such a complicated state of affairs.”

“Mr. Prime Minister, I am not saying these things out of anger or
vengefulness. I have waited long enough so that I would not be responding
from a fleeting impulse. You cannot dismiss my words tonight by saying
that a man should not be judged at his time of grief. Of course I am in
grief. But more than anger, what I feel is pain. This country pains me, and
what you and your friends are doing to it. Believe me, your success is
important to me, because the future of us all depends on your ability to get
up and do something.”

Grossman then pleaded with Olmert to speak directly to the Palestinian
people. He has argued that the flaw of the Oslo peace process of the 1990s
was that the negotiators never spoke about the shape of a final
agreement—including the shape of the future state of Palestine.

“Go to them over the head of Hamas,” Grossman said to Olmert. “Go to the
moderates among them, the ones who, like me and you, oppose Hamas
and its ways. Go to the Palestinian people. Speak to their deep grief and
wounds, recognize their continued suffering. Your status will not be
diminished, nor will that of Israel in any future negotiations. But people’s
hearts will begin to open a little to one another, and this opening has huge
power.”

Grossman told me that the self-created trap for Olmert is that he knows
what needs to be done—leave the West Bank—but is powerless to do it. “I
could give his speeches regarding peace,” Grossman said. “But when will
he evacuate an outpost?” he asked, referring to newly built satellite
enclaves outside existing settlements. “When will he speak to the hopes and
fears of the Palestinians? When will he do something to save us?”

"David Grossman thinks that you haven’t done enough to remove outposts
and leave the West Bank,” I told Olmert when I visited him a few weeks
ago. The prime minister leaned back in his chair. His face took on a dark
cast. “Listen,” he said with evident irritation. “This is why I am prime
minister and he is a writer.”

Olmert sighed. “I’ll tell you, I don’t like to argue with David since he lost his
son,” he said. “I think there is an emotional part in the way he expresses
himself about me, which has nothing to do with my views or my actions.”

Olmert is a man of medium height and build, with a high forehead and
large features, who thrusts his jaw out when he speaks. He saw me in his
office at the government compound in Jerusalem. The compound is an
armed fortress, and the prime minister’s office is separated from the outside
world by several layers of unforgiving security. Since the murder of Rabin,
and especially since Israel began targeting Hamas leaders for assassination,
the prime minister of Israel has become one of the world’s most
comprehensively guarded men.

The office itself is unadorned and windowless, narrow—a submarine. On
the wall next to Olmert’s desk hang portraits of various prime ministers,
including Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin. Two of his recent
predecessors, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, are missing. Where
are they? I asked.

“I could answer,” Olmert said waspishly, “but I prefer not to.”

Olmert is said to be capable of projecting kindness, and he has a talent for
sycophancy (his speech welcoming President Bush to Israel earlier this year
was particularly overripe). But he can be a haranguing, preemptively
defensive man. I recently watched Olmert address a small group of
American Jewish leaders, including some who, unlike the majority of
American Jews, are dubious about Olmert’s embrace of moderation, and his
willingness to negotiate the future of Jerusalem. “I know everyone is very
sensitive and very curious about Jerusalem,” he said. “Sometimes when I
hear people talking to me about Jerusalem, I say, ‘Hey, excuse me, what
exactly did you build in Jerusalem, that you are preaching to me? Who built
more in Jerusalem and did more to protect the unity of the city of
Jerusalem than any of those who are wasting lots of energies and spending
a lot of money in order to try and overswarm my position?’” (Olmert later
told me that unnamed American Jews are “investing a lot of money trying
to overthrow the government in Israel.”)

In the course of our conversation, I told Olmert I thought it wasn’t entirely
fair to discount Grossman’s criticisms as being motivated by grief. The two
men have been acquaintances for many years, and it is true that Grossman
has refused to speak to Olmert since Uri’s death. But Grossman today is
critical of Olmert’s approach to matters concerning the West Bank, and he
has said that he would speak to Olmert, and even stand with him, if he
believed that the prime minister was truly serious about taking the
necessary steps toward reconciliation with the Palestinians.

The prime minister was doubtful. “He doesn’t really separate the personal
from the political,” Olmert said. “I have a lot of respect for David, but I
think he’s wrong. First of all, he’s wrong; second, I don’t like to argue with
him.” Of the three writers who aligned against him over Lebanon, he said,
“Amos Oz is the most realistic.”

When I told Oz that Olmert wouldn’t address Grossman’s critique, he said:
“I don’t think David Grossman is blinded by grief. Grief can be an eye-
opener. He’s a perfectly legitimate critic of the Olmert government.” Oz also
rejected Olmert’s effort to draft him to his team. “I support the peace
process that began at Annapolis,” he said. “I don’t necessarily support
Olmert on what he’s doing in Gaza,” referring to recent Israeli military
incursions.

Olmert is more unpopular in Israel than George W. Bush is in the United
States. His business dealings have repeatedly drawn the attention of the
country’s police and attorney general, and his reputation is that of an
inauthentic, calculating man whose skills lie mainly in the area of self-
advancement. The commission of inquiry appointed to investigate Israeli
mistakes in Lebanon was caustic in its criticism of his leadership, finding
that Olmert acted hastily and with arrogance in the rush to war. The report
was even more critical of army and defense ministry leaders. It
characterized the Lebanon invasion as heedless and jerry-rigged. The
commission’s findings were a reminder that, as the former Prime Minister
Ehud Barak once told me, Jews excel at many things but not necessarily at
self-rule. “The last two experiments of Jews running a political state were
not great successes,” he said, referring to the Israel of King Solomon’s time,
which ultimately ended in the exile to Babylon, and to the Jewish
commonwealth of the Second Temple period, which was conquered by the
Romans, who scattered the Jews.

The purpose of my visit to Olmert’s office was not to plumb his resentment-
filled relationship with David Grossman but to discuss the meaning of
Israel’s existence. When I brought up the subject of existential threats, he
recoiled. “When the leader of a nation of 75 million people with ballistic
missiles, with modern weapons, with a declared desire to possess a nuclear
capacity, threatens Israel with annihilation, can I ignore it? Can I say I
didn’t hear it? Of course I can’t.”

Olmert was more comfortable speaking about the Zionist idea and praising
Herzl’s prophetic powers: few men understood at the start of the last
century, as Herzl did, that Europe would soon turn against its Jews so
absolutely. And he spoke of the achievements of Jewish independence—the
ingathering of Jews, most especially—all of which were unassailably
remarkable.

Then I asked him to discuss the flaws in the execution of the Zionist
program. He responded indignantly: “I don’t care about it. Of course, I
mean, I care about the flaws, I’m the prime minister. I have to improve
things, I have to amend things. But when I celebrate the 60th anniversary
of the state of Israel, what I have in mind are the enormous achievements.”
He went on to discuss the largely successful absorption of 1 million Russian
immigrants. “Of course there are flaws,” he said. “Who cares?”

With Uri Grossman in mind, I asked Olmert about a flaw of personal
concern to me: Why is Israel less physically safe for Jews than America?

He answered: “I’ll tell you something that you have to realize, and this is
the most important thing and this is the most significant thing. First of all,
no people are safe anywhere, okay? Let me tell you, Jews are not safer in
Israel than they are in other parts of the world, but there is only one place
that Jews can fight for their lives as Jews, and that is here. They can fight
as Americans, they can fight as Australians—but as individuals.” He banged
on his desk. “Jews were persecuted, Jews were attacked, Jews were
suppressed, Jews were killed. But they could never defend themselves as
Jews.”

So the success of the American Jewish community doesn’t lessen the
necessity for the state of Israel? “Never, never, no way,” he said. “By the
way, Jews in Germany—and I don’t draw any comparison at all—Jews in
other parts of the world were very successful all their lives, and that didn’t
provide them with safety.”

The prime minister of Israel should be able to muster an argument for the
necessity of his country without forecasting a Holocaust in America. His was
a careless and cynical statement, one that supports the notion that he is not
Israel’s deepest thinker. And yet his record presents an obvious
contradiction. On one crucial issue, Olmert is credited by many of the most
doubting Israelis with sincerity and thoughtfulness: his newfound belief that
the dream of a Greater Israel—one that incorporates the West Bank, Gaza,
and the Golan Heights—is dead, replaced with the recognition that the land
must be split between a Jewish democratic state and an Arab state. This
sort of transformation is as rare in Israeli politics as it is in American politics.
“His willingness to express his new convictions and to speak about them
explicitly is both bold and calculated,” one of his foremost critics, the
Ha’aretz political columnist Ari Shavit, told me.

Olmert is not the only one to undergo this transformation; an entire
generation of Likud politicians, protected by the shade cast by the great
fighter and Likud apostate Ariel Sharon, has embraced the argument that
the occupation threatens Israel’s Jewish future.

I asked Olmert whether there was a moral dimension to his desire to exit
the West Bank, and I made reference to a song of his childhood, written by
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism. The revisionists are
the ideological ancestors of the Likud Party. The song refers to the shtay
gadot, or two banks, of the Jordan River: “The Jordan has two banks, and
both are ours.”

“I would have loved to have shtay gadot!” Olmert said. It was not, as I first
thought, an unconsidered outburst. He won’t call the dream of both banks
immoral or destructively utopian, because it is a dream that many Israelis
believe is just. “If there had been a 10 percent or 15 percent minority which
is not Jewish there, then it would have been legitimate. But you don’t come
to a majority and say to them, ‘Listen, we deprive you of your right to self-
determination and at the same time we won’t provide you with the natural
right of equality and equal votes.’”

“At the end of the day, it was about demography,” he said. “We couldn’t do
it.”

The new leftists—or new realists—find justification for their position in the
earliest history of Zionism. “Go back to the Basle program of 1897, the first
Zionist Congress,” Israel’s ambassador in Washington, Sallai Meridor, told
me. Meridor and his brother Dan, who was a minister in the government of
Menachem Begin, abandoned their belief in untrammeled settlement
several years ago. “Herzl asks Nordau”—Max Nordau, the essayist and critic
who served as his deputy—“to come up with one sentence of what Zionism
is to achieve. He wrote that Zionism is meant to create for the Jewish
people a homeland in the land of Israel, assured by international legitimacy.
One sentence, the whole story. It’s about Jewish people, about defining the
community of Jews as a nation, one in the family of nations. Second, it’s not
a state for all citizens, but for the Jewish people. Third, it’s in the land of
Israel, but not necessarily all the land of Israel. And it has to be secured by
international legitimacy.”

Israel’s flagging international legitimacy is one of Olmert’s preoccupations.
In an interview with Ha’aretz in November, he said, “If the day comes when
the two-state solution collapses and we face a South African–style struggle
for equal voting rights [among Palestinians of the occupied territories],
then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.” He went on
to say, “The Jewish organizations, which were our power base in America,
will be the first to come out against us, because they will say they cannot
support a state that does not support democracy and equal voting rights for
all its residents.”

As a young Knesset member of the Likud Party, Olmert was not nearly so
concerned about Israel’s international reputation. He voted against the
ratification of the Camp David Accords with Egypt, which had been
negotiated by the leader of his party, Menachem Begin. Today, he says
Begin was right. “He was smarter than I was.” If he were alive today,
Olmert said, Begin would support an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.
“Menachem Begin understood by 1977 that we couldn’t incorporate Judea
and Samaria [the biblical names for the West Bank] into the state of Israel.
We can’t do it, and therefore he did not do it.”

What Olmert failed to mention was that Begin himself accelerated the
process of settling Israelis in the West Bank, and was in particular a zealous
supporter of Gush Emunim (the Bloc of the Faithful), the near-messianic
group that seeded the West Bank with Jewish settlements. Today, the
settlers are a small but influential political constituency (there are 200,000
settlers in the West Bank—a majority of whom moved there for economic,
rather than ideological, reasons—and another 200,000 in the eastern
suburbs of Jerusalem), and they have deployed an effective argument
against expulsion: Ariel Sharon’s forced removal of 8,000 settlers from the
Gaza Strip three years ago, undertaken unilaterally, resulted not in peace
but in a barrage of rocket attacks by Hamas on southern Israel, followed by
a continuing Israeli military response.

“I’m not saying ‘I told you so,’ but I told you so,” the settler leader Pinchas
Wallerstein said not long ago when I saw him at Migron, a settlement
outpost near Ramallah. Migron is “illegal,” built without the approval of the
government, but even the illegal outposts—there are more than 100—are in
no danger of imminent evacuation. Olmert removed one, called Amona, in
February 2006; more than 200 people, including two Knesset members,
were hurt in the riot that accompanied the demolition, and Olmert appears
wary of a repeat performance.

Like Begin, Olmert once was a friend of the settlers. I asked him why the
country only recently awoke to the threat the settlements pose. He bristled.
“First of all, this is something that must be understood with humility and
compassion,” he said. “In 1948, we achieved independence with a divided
Jerusalem, with the parts of Jerusalem that were the essential ingredients
of the collective Jewish memory and something that we yearned for, for
thousands of years, not in our hands. In 1967 came the fulfillment, finally,
of all the dreams of thousands of years by reaching the territories which are
more intimately linked to Jewish history than anything else, particularly
Jerusalem. So how can you wonder why we didn’t have the emotional
power to restrain ourselves from wanting to realize the fulfillment of our
dreams? It took us time to grasp the full complexity of the situation. But
how can you wonder, at the beginning, why we had this enthusiasm?”

I noted that by late 1967, David Ben-Gurion, then an old man in retirement
on his desert kibbutz, was arguing that Israel should find a way out of the
occupied territories as soon as possible. Did Ben-Gurion lack Zionist fervor?

Olmert litigated the question instead of answering it: “He certainly didn’t say
‘Get rid of Jerusalem.’”

What led to Olmert’s conversion regarding the settlements was not only the
realization—one that came to him over the course of three decades or
so—that the permanent occupation of the West Bank and Gaza might
undermine Israel’s security, but also a recognition that the Palestinians
themselves had changed.

“Listen, let’s face it, I don’t know what my position would have been had a
change not taken place on the other side as well. What the Palestinians
say—not all of them, of course—some of the declared, elected leadership of
the Palestinian people say, ‘I want to live in peace with Israel and I
recognize Israel’s right to exist.’ They didn’t say it 40 years ago, they didn’t
say it 30 years ago, 25 years ago.”

The Palestinians, however, are fighting a civil war. Gaza is under the control
of Hamas, which is the Palestinian offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. The
West Bank is under the control of the Palestinian Authority, headed by the
Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, who, over the past several months, has
been negotiating a framework agreement for peace with Israel. All sides
recognize that the Palestinian Authority would find it difficult to implement
an agreement, but Olmert’s goal is to negotiate the parameters of a final
settlement as a way, if nothing else, to strengthen the hands of Palestinian
moderates against Hamas.

Olmert and Grossman

UNRESOLVED: Palestinian workers approach a checkpoint to Jerusalem in
2007



The latest iteration of the never-ending Middle East peace process,
launched in Annapolis late last year by President Bush, is in many ways a
farce. Olmert’s ruling coalition is unstable, and he is deeply unpopular. Bush
shows no sustained interest in understanding the dispute. Condoleezza Rice
is ignored across the Middle East. And Abbas’s authority doesn’t radiate far
beyond Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital. The tragedy of this farce
is that this could be the last time a two-state solution is seen as a viable
option. It is a cliché for Middle East leaders to warn that time is running
out, but today it seems that the possibility of a two-state solution is swiftly
fading. Palestinian rejectionists and unbending Jewish settlement leaders
are in harmony on this point. “It does not matter what the Jews do. We will
not let them have peace,” Ibrahim Mudeiris, the imam of the Ijlin Mosque
in Gaza, told me not long ago. We spoke after Friday prayers. The street
outside the mosque was crowded with angry young men who had been
excited by Mudeiris’s sermon, in which he identified Jews as “the sons of
apes and pigs.”

“They can be nice to us or they can kill us, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “If
we have a cease-fire with the Jews, it is only so that we can prepare
ourselves for the final battle.”

For Palestinian radicals, the closing of the settlements would be a terrible
blow. The smartest Palestinian strategists understand this. “The longer they
stay out there, the more Israel will appear to the world to be essentially an
apartheid state,” the former Palestinian Authority negotiator Michael Tarazi
told me a few years ago. “The settlements mean that the egg is hopelessly
scrambled. Basically, it is already one state.”

The hard-core settlers are as intransigent, and as patient, as their
Palestinian counterparts. The mayor of Ariel, one of the West Bank’s largest
Jewish towns, told me that time is on the side of the settlers. Ariel, which
has a population of roughly 20,000, is southwest of Nablus, the largest Arab
city in the West Bank. “We have to hold on for a few more years, at most,”
Ron Nachman, the mayor, said. “Then the world will realize that the
solution lies with Jordan.” Nachman, along with many other West Bank
settler leaders, believes that the Palestinians of the West Bank should be
made Jordanian citizens. The Palestinians don’t generally seek this. Nor do
the Jordanians. But Nachman said that once the world realizes that Israel’s
presence in the West Bank is eternal, it will come to view the “Jordanian
option” as a plausible solution. “Trust me, no one is throwing us out of
Ariel,” he said.

For many of the settlers, and certainly for their spiritual leaders, the state of
Israel’s democracy is of minimal concern. A couple of years ago, I visited
the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem, which has graduated many of the
settlement movement’s leaders, to speak to its rabbis about the balance
between democracy and Judaism.

In early March, the yeshiva was attacked by a Palestinian gunman who
killed eight students, mainly teenagers, in a library. When I had visited
Mercaz HaRav, Rabbi David Samson, a teacher at the yeshiva and one of
the leading proponents of its philosophy, had foretold the attack: “We are
of course a target of terror. The enemies of the Jewish people know the
importance of this yeshiva. We send forth the pioneers to build the state.”
In the course of a lengthy discussion, Samson explained the yeshiva’s
position on democracy. “Democracy is not a value for us. Justice is a value,
and fairness, but not democracy. In the Book of Exodus, it says that the
Jews shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. It does not talk about
democracy.” The Arabs who live in biblical Israel, he said, can either choose
“to get along with us, to live peacefully, or to leave.” He said the Arabs
would have the status of “protected foreigners” in Israel; they would have
local autonomy, but have no say in the governance of Israel.

What if the world rejects this? “The world has always rejected the Jews. But
God always provides.” God will punish the Jews, he said, if they divide the
Holy Land. “A Palestinian state would be an abomination.”

A Palestinian state, of course, might not come to pass. Ziad Abu Zayyad, a
former minister in the Palestinian Authority government, is a veteran peace
negotiator and one of the few Palestinian leaders who still view a two-state
solution as conceivable. “There are only two or three years left,” he said. “If
this doesn’t work, then everyone will be arguing for a one-state solution.”

The one-state solution—the dissolution of Israel and the merging of the
Jewish and Arab populations—is neither practicable nor, from the Israeli
perspective, desirable. (In the 1940s, many Jewish thinkers endorsed the
idea of binationalism, but the idea was rejected by the Arabs.) In any case,
the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish state would, of course, demand the
agreement of Israel’s Jews, who, for manifold reasons, would not want to
live in a state dominated by Arabs. “I’ll make a prediction that Israel will not
commit suicide,” Yehezkel Dror, the head of the Jewish People Policy
Planning Institute and a political scientist at Hebrew University, told me.

David Grossman, like most of Israel’s leftists, sees binationalism as
simultaneously utopian and dismissive of Jewish feelings. “You know,
binationalism doesn’t work in so many places in the world,” he said. “You
see it in Belgium now. And they expect, with this really hateful combination
of Jews and Arabs, that it will succeed here? It’s so wrong. Part of the cure
for the historical distortions of both peoples is that they need a place of
their own with defined borders. We have to heal separately. I’m a little
suspicious of these people who would experiment on us with binationalism.”

Reality, he said, has made a Jewish state necessary. “Since the world has
failed to defend Jewish existence, there is a need for a place for the Jews to
implement their culture and their values and their language and their
history, a place in which to recover.”

But what if Israel’s neighbors never give its Jews a chance to recover from
history?

Since the collapse of the Oslo peace process, eight years ago, many of
Grossman’s allies on the left have abandoned the idea that Arabs will
reconcile themselves to a Jewish state in their midst. Benny Morris, a
historian who has done much work to uncover evidence of Jewish sin, as
well as Arab sin, in the birth of Israel, recently wrote: “The situation
[Jewish] Israelis live in, and even more so, most likely face, is antediluvian,
revolutionary and possibly apocalyptic.” When I spoke to Morris in
Jerusalem, he described Israel as an “amazing success story” and, in
virtually the same sentence, called it “the most dangerous place in the
world for Jews as Jews, as a collective of 5 million people who are in danger
of extinction in the short term from an Iranian nuclear bomb and in the
long term by being overwhelmed by Arabs.”

Grossman, despite his existential fears, has not given up on the idea of
compromise. In The Yellow Wind, he tells of the time he found himself
trapped at Bethlehem University, as a Palestinian demonstration raged
around him.

I write the following in my green notebook: Now, the truth. Are you afraid?
Yes. And if something happens to you here, if they hurt you, do you think it
will cause you to revise your opinions? To begin to surrender to hate? And if
they were to hurt your child?

I set down the answer for the record and as personal testimony, and it is all
written there, in the green notebook.

His private answer is now public; since Uri’s death, he has not cast aside his
opposition to occupation and settlement, or his belief in reconciliation.

But this does not necessarily suggest that he would make a sophisticated
negotiator, or a sound strategist. Grossman believes that Israel must
negotiate with Hamas, an organization that pays obeisance to Iran, that
bases its charter in part on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and that has
shown itself to be more interested in destroying Israel than in building a
state of its own.

Of course, any such talks would necessarily grant legitimacy to Hamas and
undermine the more moderate Palestinian leadership in the West Bank who
remain Israel’s best, and perhaps only, hope for a more tranquil future.

The West Bank leadership cannot be buttressed merely with rhetoric, or
with ineffectual negotiations meant to erect only the scaffolding of an
agreement. The Camp David negotiations in 2000 collapsed mainly because
the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat, was unable to strike a final deal with
Israel. But during the seven years of the Oslo peace process, which was
meant to negotiate a Palestinian state into existence, the number of Jewish
settlers in the West Bank nearly doubled. It is difficult to blame Palestinians
for their cynicism about Israeli intentions regarding the West Bank. Only by
closing outposts and dismantling settlements can Israeli leaders help the
Palestinian moderates, and themselves. When I asked Olmert why he
argues for an Israeli withdrawal from Palestinian territory but allows the
expansion of existing settlements and the continued existence of illegal
outposts, he barked, “I dismantled Amona!” Amona is the outpost that
came down in February 2006. “That was the most traumatic event, even
more than the disengagement from Gaza. It was very violent.”

Not one outpost has been dismantled since Amona was closed, and none
seems slated for impending disappearance. This is the core of Grossman’s
criticism of Olmert. The prime minister, in his view, is a skilled rhetorician
but a political coward, one who speaks the language of reconciliation but
whose actions in Lebanon, and in Gaza, suggest something else.

There is a split on the left; some of Grossman’s allies believe that he is, in
fact, too hard on the prime minister. “Olmert is paralyzed because the
people are paralyzed,” A. B. Yehoshua said. “The whole country is
paralyzed.”

And tired. Benny Morris noted recently that, just as the West is tired of the
hundred-year war in the Middle East, so too are Israelis. Morris’s analysis
contained an echo of a statement made by Olmert three years ago, when
he was still vice premier under Sharon. “We are tired of fighting,” he told
the Israel Policy Forum, a liberal pro-Israel group, in New York. “We are
tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of
defeating our enemies. We want that we will be able to live in an entirely
different environment of relations with our enemies.”

Olmert’s shift to the left did not occur in a vacuum. His wife, Aliza, has been
a sympathizer of Peace Now, and his children have been left-wing activists.
One daughter, Dana, is a prominent gay-rights advocate in Tel Aviv, and
has associated herself with groups opposed to her father’s policies. During
the 2006 Israeli incursions into Gaza, she took part in a demonstration that
denounced the army chief of staff as a “child-killer.” One of Olmert’s sons
has refused to serve his army-reserve duty in the occupied territories, and
another son managed to avoid the draft altogether. Olmert’s family is not
entirely unusual; the secular left, which once provided a disproportionate
number of officers and commandos to the army, no longer does so; sons of
the settlements now account for more than 25 percent of the Israeli officer
corps. Which makes the left-wing Grossman family’s contribution to the
national defense more striking.

I asked Olmert whether he would still like to reconcile with Grossman.
“Look, I have responsibilities to attend to,” he said. “I met with every one of
the bereaved families who was ready to meet with me. He was
demonstrating against me rather than sitting with me. Which is perfectly
legitimate, but I sit with many of the families. I think most of them came
here and sat with me, something you don’t find in any other country in the
world. If you would know how many hours I spent with the families of the
fallen soldiers!”

Olmert blustered on for a while, comparing himself to Rudy Giuliani,
stressing his commitment to peace and security, mocking his former Likud
colleagues, and praising himself for the care he provides the families of the
dead. He neglected to mention something I learned only later. For almost
two years, he has repeatedly sent emissaries to Grossman, hoping for a
reconciliation. These emissaries included his daughter Dana and a former
speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, both sent to persuade Grossman to
see him. Dana Olmert’s visit backfired; Grossman asked her to place herself
in his shoes: Would she reconcile with her father, if she were Grossman?
No, she said, according to people familiar with the conversation.

Burg’s message was unequivocal. Olmert is trying to save Israel by
compromising with the Palestinians, and he is in dire need of help. The
prime minister has permanently alienated the country’s right wing. The
Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva announced shortly after the fatal attack that Olmert
would not be welcome to pay a condolence call. “We cannot receive a
prime minister who advocates against the spirit of the Torah and accept
that Israel withdraws from a part of the Land of Israel,” a yeshiva official,
Rabbi Haim Steiner, said.

Burg told me: “I believe that any person who wants to influence society
cannot allow himself to be in a situation where you won’t talk to the prime
minister.” But Grossman has so far rejected Burg’s pleas.

Burg’s visit was motivated not only by politics, he said. He is concerned
about Olmert’s emotional well-being.

“The prime minister suffers the casualties of war,” Burg said. “He doesn’t
sleep at night. He knows what Uri Grossman represents.”


The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200805/israel.