The Thing with Feathers: Israel, 2024
Being dispatches from the ground in Tel Aviv, from a New Yorker making Aliyah to Israel in late 2024.
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Installment #4: 9/17/2024
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"Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and never stops at all."
—Emily Dickinson
“Assassination is the assassination of hope."
— Bernard Malamud
"You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we die."
— Viktor Laszlo in Casablanca (1942)
TEL AVIV, 9/17/2024
Two days ago, about 30 hours before this writing, on Sunday Sept. 15, 2024, someone tried to shoot Donald Trump again: this time on his golf course at Mar-A-Lago in Florida. Trump was not hit, while the assailant (a pro-Ukrainian activist and former Trump voter) was caught fleeing in his truck on the highway 45 minutes later, and Kamala Harris was quoted saying she is "glad" Trump is safe and OK.
In November 1995, at the end of a Tel Aviv peace rally in support of the Oslo Accords, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in front of more than 100,000 people in "Kings Square," now known as "Rabin Square." Almost two years ago, 2022's Labor Party chief at the time, Merav Michaeli—at a conference organized by the Yisrael Hayom newspaper ahead of a memorial ceremony marking 27 years since Rabin's killing—was quoted saying "Yitzhak Rabin was murdered in a political assassination. He was murdered in a political assassination with the cooperation of Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben Gvir.”
Ben-Gvir, of course, is one of the two extreme right-wing Kahanists who today, among other acts, is literally hoisting up and holding together Bibi Netanyahu's current majority in the Knesset (a 'deal with the devil' that many who love Israel say is a partnership antithetical to everything Israel stands for). But he, Ben-Gvir, first captured national attention when he was filmed as a teen boasting about stealing an emblem from Rabin’s car a short time before the assassination. "We got to his [Rabin's] car, and we’ll get to him, too,” he told a reporter at the time in televised comments. Obviously, this guy is not another David Ben-Gurion.
When the big election was held soon after Rabin's murder, Netanyahu—personifying a clear, ideological shift in the Israeli public's mindset—won the Prime Ministership... while Rabin's widow Leah Rabin went on television to blame Netanyahu's silence for her husband's death: "They [raised placards] of my husband in Nazi uniform and Mr. Netanyahu was there. He later talked against it, but he was there and he didn't stop it." Mrs. Rabin went on to say that she "thought about refusing to shake hands with Netanyahu at her husband's funeral, but then decided not to make a scene."
Murder and political assassination is again in the air, in these final weeks of the 2024 presidential election in America, with the Secret Service immediately upping the level of the security details around both of the major US party candidates.
And yet truly, what parallels can be drawn, as Israel's war with Iran's proxies moves north from Gaza—and as the American social fabric appears to be coming apart from a kind of fear-of-death surrounding an election that was unimaginable before today. What's going on, really? Have the fires of the planet's climate catastrophe spread now to its political divides as well? Has James Baldwin's "Fire Next Time" come to roost like Malcolm X's chickens, in what even the most neutral of editorials have at times called a deathwatch over Democracy's survival in the West (which includes Israel or, at least... always has, right)?
There are now so many (too many, and all of them are bad analogies) comparisons between the political strife that's risen, monster-like, in America, with the completely fractured state of internal Israeli politics: a horror show of fragmentation that includes the left, the right, the center, Likud, Labor-Meretz, Netanyahu's attempt to engineer judicial reforms so that he would not be indicted, the Ultra Orthodox not serving in the IDF, then the law authorizing conscription of the Ultra Orthodox, the settlers committing violence against the Palestinians in the West Bank, Hamas moving to the West Bank, the Kahanists rising again with one thing—Greater Israel—on their minds, as 'Families of the Gazan Hostages' face off in the streets with the 'Death to Hamas at all Cost' Advocates, and land-for-peace activists, NGOs and womens' rights organizations toil on, ignored almost entirely by the majority of Israeli media....
"Keep hope alive." Wasn't that the phrase? The chant became famous as the political rallying cry of MLK associate and presidential candidate Jesse Jackson, who ended his big speech with those words, from the podium of the DNC when he ran for President against Michael Dukakis in 1988.
But the words were first written in the Old Testament's Book of Psalms, number 71: sometimes translated into English as "But as for me, I will always have hope" and sometimes as "But I will keep hope alive, and I will praise you more and more."
And so: in Israel in late 2024, as with the sensational rise of Kamala Harris in a single month in the United States starting last July, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I believe hope is still alive in Israel—even as another quarter of a million protesters gathered again three nights ago in Tel Aviv in a state that appeared to be despairing—more despairing, perhaps, than was apparent in recent mass gatherings. It's not obvious, this hope, it's not even visible to most. But I think it's still here in this small, necessary nation. It arrived sometime in the 1880s, as a psychological frame of mind, born of a once-in-a-millenium act of nation-building that was relentless and optimistic. Within 60-70 years it had somehow seeped into the DNA of those Jews in the new homeland: it was as if conscious will had become unconscious inclination and perhaps, unexplainably, that inclination had become somehow genetic: a contagious desire to live life fully, after centuries of dispersed national depression.
The "World Happiness Report" [the "WHR"] is an influential publication (produced in partnership between Gallup and Oxford University) that ranks 'quality of life' criteria across every nation on earth. For years Israel has ranked in the top 5, along with Finland, and all the other Scandinavian countries (with Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland and the Netherlands consistently rounding out the top ten). But as psychologist Robert M. Schwartz wrote last week in his Times of Israel blog called "The Damaging Myth of Israeli Wartime 'Happiness'":
"Israel ranked fourth in happiness before the Gaza War and dropped only one rank to fifth after the war started [i.e. by late March '24]... But the sad truth is that although Israel does have a high quality of life satisfaction, it ranked much lower in its "Emotional Happiness Ratio" ["EHR"] before the war, and is seriously unhappy after only the first three months of war, when this same "EHR" dropped from 72.6% to 48% representing a staggering plunge of 85 ranks, from 52nd to 137th out of 138 countries. To appreciate this, consider that Israel’s rank is now sandwiched between Lebanon at 136th and Afghanistan at 138th...."
Hope: before the Intifadas, before the failure of Oslo and Clinton's last-gasp Camp David Summit and probably, even before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, a Jew from the diaspora could feel it within minutes of debarking a plane at Ben-Gurion airport. One could see it in every face, feel it in every handshake, every hug: it was in the goddam air. Yet now a seeming majority of Israelis of fortitude and faith and courage—to a woman, to a man, the true believers, those who think about it, and worry about it all the time, especially as their children come into and out of adolescence, when they will have to enlist, and fight with a gun, despite all the agony and doubt about who they'll be fighting and, perhaps, sacrificing for—WHICH Israel is to be protected now: which of two Israels, really—the ones who want it to last forever, or the ones who are fighting for their little ideological corner, despite the cost to national longevity and unity—is getting the best these newly-recruited, soldier-youths have to offer? Is it the same question or is it not, over in America: what are the patriots going to do when the reason to be an "American" is stripped from their lives because of a rogue television channel, and an over-meme-ing of untruths destroying the ecology of their intellectual atmosphere, encouraging—nay birthing—the death of Democracy?
Part of me believes (foolishly?) that 'hope' in Israel has somehow become indestructible, despite the current, seemingly impossible challenges: that this hope is so entrenched, that nothing now can make it ever go away—no corrupt government within, no co-option from America, no endless homicidal jihad from Iranian proxies, no drained economy nor brain-drain—real or evolving—not even the world's gaslighting of the Jewish state via ignorant, exhausting, endless proclamations that Israel has committed or is committing anything other than self-defense in Gaza, and elsewhere on its national borders.
Today, in 2024, dinner and lunch conversations with my fellow Israelis on the political left and center in Tel Aviv never begin with "The War." Instead they begin with the civil war in Israel today—the one that's battered the Jewish population who've stayed put, while driving many of their best friends to emigrate: from exhaustion and menace from the endless hatred across the border. This departure of friends and relatives may well be personifying the possible death of the dream for Israelis who stay, fight, and... hope... whose beloved fellow countrymen are leaving for London, for Berlin, back to live under the unsunny skies of North and Central Europe. Again.
And for those Israelis who stick it out as best they can: will they too, now, eventually succumb? Will the best of them leave? Will they lose hope, which means: will they stop being 'Israeli' by definition?
At first they didn't: not in early 2023. They marched. They gathered in the hundreds of thousands as they'd never gathered before. It was HOPE that drove them to the square, to wave flags and shout out their support for democracy—as central to their Israeli identity as their being Jewish—that same genetic identity that permanently brands them as refugees from a gentile world that never wants them around.
It was one thing to stop the right-wing's hard push to disempower Israel's Supreme court last year. It's been quite another to have their neighbors to the South be slaughtered and kidnapped, in the pogrom to end all pogroms last October, when a new—again unwanted—war was born.
Now the anniversary of the beginning of that war is arriving in 20 days. And to date it's been contra-national security to hold proper investigative hearings to name those Israelis in government who are to blame for the breach of Gaza—the betrayal in fact, of the first and primary role of the nations' leaders over here: to protect the population from a darkness, from a "never again." — It's no different in America, though less easy to imagine anymore: keep the country safe. Keep the children from being taken away. Thousands were killed, but none kidnapped on 9/11. No American mothers were separated forever from their children while both were still alive, as in the Nazi concentration.
October 7, 2023, had many moving parts, many failures both human and machine. But I tell you this: you'll be shocked, if you watch the 28 minute PBS/Washington Post documentary on YouTube, right now, called "Failure at the Fence". I repeat: "FAILURE AT THE FENCE": the YouTube search engine will find it in under a second. The doc was actually made 8 months ago, and broadcast all over America. But when I shared its 'link' with a well-read Israeli friend of mine last week, his astonished response to me (and I am quoting him) was:
"Most of the facts and materials in this documentary were not disclosed in Israel — probably censored. Unbelievable."
The author of every active measure in the realm of defense since, at the very least, his second inauguration in 2009 to today, is and was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. While many engineers, military minds, political and financial underlings came up with ideas, NONE were implemented without Bibi's approval. This includes: all the money going from Qatar to Hamas, all (and I mean ALL) the tunnel building—never halted or inhibited by Israel, despite its formidable intelligence apparatus—all the rocket and weapons' manufacturing, all the smuggling, and most importantly, all the fence-building on the Israeli side and the reasoning behind all that fencing's specifics. Fact One: the whole... protective Gaza border apparatus was built to deter and keep out not the 6000-strong Hamas army that stormed the ramparts that day, but only a dozen or so jihadists who in small teams might approach the wall and/or fence. Fact Two: there were seven Israeli-installed balloons in the air surrounding Gaza, equipped with cameras, scopes and alarms. But Fact Three: they were all built in 2006, and 3 of the seven had become inoperable by 2023. Of the many women soldier-spotters of these balloons, all had complained for years leading up to October 7—with most of them having officially voiced their complaint to their superiors—that the cameras had become unreadable—while almost half were, in fact, broken. And Fact Four, had large platoons of ground troops been stationed tight to the fence, after months of unreported attack rehearsals by Hamas had gone unreported—just in case a large, murderous army did storm the wall in a near-genius combination of a mass of fired rockets covering, overhead, the motorcyclists on paragliders and the wall-and-fence destroying bombs that had been set by Hamas to enable the breach—would the words "October 7" or "Black Saturday" never have been published, in newspapers, online, or coming soon to a screen near you?
There was only one Author of this particular October, and this author was the one who was in charge, and under whose watch this textbook defense failure was made possible. Incomprehensibly, this 'Author' is still writing solo, a year later: he is still in charge of the war. He is obsessed with correcting his decades of accumulated acts of error (which enabled the terror): as much obsessed with restoring his reputation as "Mister Security" as he is obsessed with pushing agendas that will go way beyond the simple, baseline goal of 'victory in war'.
One form of victory, discussed endlessly these days in Israeli media, would result in the annexation of all the lands 'temporarily' secured in 1967, along with the eventual expulsion of the Palestinian population once and for all. The only thing not discussed is the wording of the ads: "New homes for Jews: cheap! Near the airport!" ... Safe?
But of course another form of victory could result in peace, prosperity, Abrahamic or otherwise—it could take the form of, at the very least, an end to a century and a half of endless memorials, and of mothers' and fathers' tears, and at the very most the beginning of an untroubled version of Herzl's dream.
Can it be said with accuracy that Israelis on the left and center, and in between, are living a life now, in September 2024, that is perhaps oddly familiar... not familiar to anything that's happened yet, but of what's to come? In America? .... When I see them, my fellow Israelis, I feel as though I'm somehow looking at a future version of those I've left behind for awhile, back in New York—it feels.. they feel... like some odd version in a looking-glass, one in which Kamala has lost, and they're acting and feeling—and marching, again—exactly like Americans will theoretically be doing 3 years from now, if Trump were to win, and some disastrous, national, anti-democracy nightmare will have descended to darken our lives.
Hope. Maybe it doesn't need to be kept alive. Maybe it already is alive and doesn't need any help. We just have to keep breathing.
Powerful piece! Thank you!