The Jerusalem Report Magazine: Columnists : Columnists Article

Click for Contents

Click here to subscribe to The Jerusalem Report

P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017
Tel. 972-2-531-5440,
Fax: 972-2-537-9489
Advertising Fax:
972-2-531-5425,
Email Editorial: [email protected]
Subscriptions: [email protected]
Web site: http://www.jrep.com

David Horovitz: The Pregnancy Test

My sister-in-law visited from Manhattan recently. On the night we all wanted to go out to eat on Emek Refaim, in the German Colony, we couldn�t get a table at a favorite restaurant, just down the street from where Caf� Hillel was blown up last September.

A few days later, we took the kids to what, until the conflict pushed many Israelis and most tourists away, used to be some of the most popular parts of Tel Aviv: Sheinkin Street, the coolest of them all, with its pedestrian traffic of multiple piercings and multi-hued hairdos; the Carmel market, where hoarse traders loudly ridicule their own impossibly low fruit and vegetable prices and don�t even try to stay straight-faced when denying that their brand-name jeans and T-shirts are knock-offs; and Nahalat Binyamin, where stall after stall of wooden picture frames, handmade plaster hamsas and exquisite painted mirrors barely hint at Israel�s reviving pool of artistry and small-business savvy. And the crowds were back there too, strolling lazily in the early summer sunshine. Applauding the (Sabra) jugglers and the (Russian) street artists. Testing the skills of the young girls who effortlessly braid Ashkenazi and Sephardi locks into complex Ethiopian patterns. And double-taking at the sight of Miri Aloni, she who stood next to Rabin and prompted him through "A Song for Peace" on that fateful night nine years ago, now a permanent Friday busking feature at the corner of Nahalat Binyamin and Allenby Street.

So fast is Israel "normalizing" that the Tourism Ministry has barely issued one set of improved figures before another, better set, can be compiled, and Birthright groups of overseas students have been blanking lately when I ask them how hysterical some of their parents are about letting them come here.

These 45 months of conflict have taken more civilian casualties than Israel had lost since the War of Independence ended. But the relative decline in the terrorist murder rate of late is unmistakable, a gradual fall since the peak of that unprecedentedly horrific March 2002, when the Pesah bombing of the Park Hotel brought a single month�s death toll to the unfathomable total of 126. It is a decline emphatically linked to the change in military strategy effected after that Netanyah bombing: the army�s return to the West Bank cities it had relinquished in 1995 under the Oslo Accords, the mass arrests of Palestinians suspected of involvement in violence, the extensive intelligence derived from subsequent interrogations, the relentless targeting of bombers and bombmakers such intelligence facilitates, and the gradual construction of the security barrier, complicating access across what used to be the open borders of sovereign Israel. (Thanks to the Supreme Court�s wise intervention, that barrier is now to be belatedly rerouted, as it should always have been routed, closer to the pre-1967 Green Line border -- minimizing its impact on ordinary Palestinians and, crucially for the barrier�s security imperative, minimizing the number of Palestinians who will find themselves on the "safe" side.)

But for all the successes, the motivation of those Palestinians who would deliberately blow us up and gun us down remains high, the hatred as acute. Though the security services thwart an ever-higher proportion of suicide bombers, those bombers keep on coming -- inflamed both by their leadership and by the very measures Israel takes to protect itself; there are hundreds of volunteer killers just awaiting the opportunity. And as we have learned in just the past few days, if the bombers are continually stymied, murderous ingenuity can be redirected: with

a tunnel burrowed into the heart of an Israeli military position in Gaza, the lives of all but one of its force of dozens of soldiers spared only because the tunnelers� final explosive thrust was fractionally misdirected; or with ever-improved cross-border rocket fire that no security barrier can intercept.

The Israeli public, and the true Zionists who have joined us here in the past 45 months, are prevailing. We are prevailing because we have forced ourselves to live with a terrorist conflict more relentless, pervasive and systematic than any other nation has been made to endure. I know of no Israelis whatsoever, not one, who have done what normal people might reasonably have done: huddled at home, afraid to set foot in the potentially bloody streets outside. We have so internalized the need for security precautions everywhere -- for guards at bus stops and supermarket entrances and schools -- that we don�t really see them anymore. Pregnant friends barely notice that their tummies are, unthinkably, gently probed when they enter a caf� -- a bitter legacy of the "pregnant" Palestinian woman who, in January 2002, tucked her bomb under her coat en route to detonation at the junction of Jerusalem�s King George and Jaffa roads.

But let�s not delude ourselves. This does not amount to victory. Much as we may try to disengage ourselves from those on the far side of the Gaza fence and the spreading West Bank security barrier, true victory will be achieved only when the mainstream leadership there changes tone from inciting violence and "martyrdom" to encouraging coexistence, and when it changes practical strategy -- from chasing down the "collaborators" who warn us of murderers en route to chasing down the murderers. And we�ll know victory�s been achieved when pregnant women can enter caf�s without a stomach frisking.