At night, after the kids are in bed, a Hebrew University professor of political science sits on his Jerusalem balcony with a cup of coffee. He listens to the gunfire, followed by tank fire exchanges between the Israeli army in the Jewish neighborhood of Gilo and Palestinian gunmen in the Arab-Christian neighborhood of Beit Jala.
“It’s very uncomfortable, a strange situation,” said Reuven Hazan. “Something is wrong with this picture, and that is that this something wrong has become normality.”
The professor, who also serves as an adviser to the Speaker of the Knesset as well as a consultant for several Israeli think tanks, spoke in San Francisco at the Jewish Community Federation building last month at a lunchtime lecture called “Israel Behind the Headlines. ” The event was sponsored by the JCF and Jewish Community Relations Council.
Hazan prefaced his talk by saying that there was no such thing as objectivity in Israel, and that his remarks should be taken in proper context, spoken by someone who had supported the Oslo peace process and was dismayed by its failure.
Nevertheless, he said, it is difficult to say that there is a left wing in Israel anymore. As the Palestinian uprising has entered its 12th month, showing no signs of abating, Israeli public opinion has lurched to the right.
“Israel today is monochromatic,” he said. He gave some statistics to support his argument — that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was elected by 75 percent of the Israeli people and after six months, he still has a 75 percent approval rating.
Sharon, he said, was elected not to negotiate, but to wage war against the Palestinians. “He was elected to hit the Palestinians and hit them hard.”
Some 85 percent of those Israelis who voted for Sharon believe that his reprisals against Palestinian violence should be stronger, said Hazan, and some 70 percent of those who voted for former Prime Minister Ehud Barak said the same.
Asking Shimon Peres to join the Sharon government was simply a survival measure. “If elections were held today, the whole peace camp would be decimated,” he said.
While Israeli public opinion had matured since the 1967 Six-Day War, polls are showing that it is not where it was in the ’60s, with Israelis believing that they’re fighting for the very survival of a Jewish state, against a Palestinian enemy that can’t be trusted.
Calling the situation a “Catch-22,” Hazan painted a picture of a basically hopeless situation, in which Arafat has no incentive to stop the violence, and both Israelis and Palestinians believe they have time on their side. “The situation is about as bad as one can design,” he said.
With Israel’s measures to defend itself receiving criticism from all corners, Hazan said that Israelis felt very much alone. Condemning Israel for acting to stop residents of its capital city from being shot reveals a double standard, he charged.
Perhaps most sobering of all, Hazan said, is that in another poll taken recently, when Israelis were asked whether the current situation had made them seriously consider leaving Israel, 25 percent said yes. And when those 25 percent were asked whether they had taken any concrete steps to make that happen, 10 percent said yes.
That group of 25 percent is made up of two disparate groups, he said. The first is composed of poor and uneducated Israelis, who would have trouble getting work permits in another country. But the other is the most highly educated, those who could quickly get jobs nearly anywhere in the world.
Hazan said he experienced the attrition in his own neighborhood, where many people he knows — some of them immigrants to Israel — are thinking of leaving.
“When terrorism continues for a full year, and you don’t see an end on the horizon, there are many people who say ‘we have to give our kids a safer future.'”
The future of the Middle East lies in Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat’s hands, Hazan said. The problem is, “he wants to end the violence too, but he has no idea how to do it without looking like a loser.”
President Clinton’s over-involvement in the Middle East peace process and President Bush’s under-involvement both have proven to be miserable failures, he said, and “both administrations have shown a disease of taking American values and applying them to the Middle East. Maybe this problem doesn’t have a solution.”
Speaking of the criticism coming from around the globe and the anti-Israel bias in the media, Hazan ended on a completely gloomy note.
To his American Jewish audience, he said, “If we’re not united and you’re not united with us, then the state of Israel will be an experiment in the history books and not in the headlines any longer.”