There's one thing you quickly learn upon arriving in Israel: Everyone has an opinion. Whether it's the elderly cheese vendor at the Mahane Yehuda souk urging you to hurry up and get married or the Arab hardware store owner urging you to hurry up and have babies, everyone has their own ideas. Or there was my previous landlord, a hardheaded businessman, who informed me that it was silly that I'd taken a year off to write fiction while I was single, when it makes much more sense to do that sort of thing after marriage and kids, since writing is so easy!
For all its tininess, Israel is packed with such a diversity of people and their strongly held ideas that it often seems like a living microcosm of the old Jewish joke: How many synagogues does a shipwrecked Jew build on a desert island? Two -- the one he goes to and the one he doesn't.
This diversity of ideas extends inevitably into politics: now there is not only right-wing and left-wing, there is also a centrist party which leftists can deride as being too right-wing and rightists can disdain as too left-wing.
As someone who really would rather focus on art than politics, I tend to collect friends from across the political spectrum, admittedly avoiding the extremists on both sides.
What has been so remarkable in the past two weeks is the way this country has suddenly knit itself together, like a broken bone that finally decided it was time to heal. The plight of Israelis in the south, which the government had ignored for so long, is a cause that has no political boundaries. The bombarded southern cities are home to some of Israel's poorest populations, people who cannot afford to live anywhere else, much less to leave without selling their homes.
The neglect of the Israeli government for this suffering population is reminiscent of the disastrous government neglect of New Orleans before and during Hurricane Katrina: It is hard to imagine that the story would not have been different had such destruction threatened New York or Los Angeles. And by the same token, it is hard to believe that a persistent rain of rockets on north Tel Aviv would ever have been tolerated for a moment.
Thus the vast majority of Israelis, on the left as well as the right, recognize that the government has a moral imperative to make life livable for our neighbors in the south, who for three years have been raising their children in bomb shelters.
But it is a heartbreaking imperative. Here in Jerusalem, many of us carry out our day to day activities under a cloud. Especially with the gory media images that are everywhere, and the seemingly universal shriek of "Genocide!" that greets us on the internet. Especially now that the funerals for 19-21 year-old soldiers have begun, attended by groups of dazed-looking teenagers who have watched their high school dreams shatter. Especially now that everyone knows someone who has been called up: In my case, a brother-in-law and father of a two year-old.
Of course there is a minority of protesters here against the operation, as there always have been and always will be. Most of these protesters are from academia, which I have always thought must be a nice place to live. But the student body that produced a prize-winning academic thesis claiming that IDF soldiers' lack of rape of Palestinian women is just as degrading as if they had raped them, because the lack of rape "strengthens ethnic boundaries" (I'm not kidding--and the best part, I think, is that it won a prize) seems to me to have some issues to work out on its own.
Most of us, left, right and center, are all together, as we haven't been for a long time. As we won't be when this ends and the media circus of the elections begins.
One of my friends, heartbroken by the events in Gaza but equally sure that the Gaza Operation must go forward for the protection of Israel's southern cities, has proudly declared on his blog,
I am pro-Palestinian. I grew up with the dream of Yitzhak Rabin, of a two-state solution, that would allow both Israelis and Palestinians lead normal lives. Lives where children can dream beyond the current conflict. Lives where people can sit in a cafe and chat for hours about nothing and everything, without fear of a random act of terror. Lives where people live, have jobs, and raise children to love, not hate; to respect difference, not fear it.
He is not alone.