Opinion What peace,what process?
Israel seems focused on its own problems,rather than in rehashing old disputes
Mount Gilboa,Israel Having spent Hanukkah seeing more friends this year than usual,I was able to canvass our conversations for a fair number of topics beyond kids,health,real estate and other standard catching-up fare. The friends I met were all Jewish Israelis,some on the right but mostly people of the left,some traditional but most secular. After my visits,I scribbled in a notebook the highlights of those talks.
And then I looked online for the Israel-related news of the day. I came across these headlines: Arab World Must Stop Israels Judaisation of JLem,Tourist Centre Planned at Sensitive Jerusalem Site,Israel Strikes Kill Gaza Militant,Israel Didnt Know Hi-Tech Gear Was Sent to Iran. The news was mostly about Israelis and Arabs,the Iranian threat,Palestinian grievances and the peace process.
My notebook contained nothing of the sort. No Palestinians,no Arabs,no Iranians. No West Bank settlements,Gaza,or Hamas. No discussion of the peace process. When my friends chose to talk about politics,it was to debate the role of the Israeli government in delivering social justice,or to make sense of recent controversies about the status of Israeli women,or to question the impact of Israels so-called summer of protest.
On the way from Tel Aviv,our cars were virtually scratching the fence that separates most Israelis from most Palestinians. The waves of Palestinian terrorism in the mid-2000s that got that divider built are long past; Palestinians live behind the fence now; there is no process to argue about.
After decades of virtually no break from talking about war and peace,Israelis are taking time off from the issue. In September,Israelis had to stop discussing social justice to make room for the Palestinians failed attempt to have the UN recognise a Palestinian state and for the release of the Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit from Gaza.
One can see this change as a sign that Israelis have gotten too used to the current and supposedly unsustainable situation with the Palestinians,and now foolishly believe the status quo can last forever. Or perhaps its a sign that they see little point in debating a topic about which they generally agree: a decent peace deal for most of the occupied land (with many devils in the details). Or maybe theyre just tired of rehashing what has become a very boring issue with no new angles and no new arguments.
I look at this shift in conversation through a more positive lens: Maybe Israelis have realised that they need to sort some things out among themselves pending the big breakthrough in their relations with Palestinians and other Arabs. Maybe they have realised that having a more robust and more cohesive Israel will make this peace more achievable when the day for it finally comes.
Shmuel Rosner is an editor and columnist based in Tel Aviv,and senior political editor for The Jewish Journal
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