Letter From Israel (Page 2)

"Israel behaves like a society in a coma, completely opaque and closed," the philosopher Adi Ophir told me a few days after Ya'alon's remarks made front-page news. "But there are cracks in that opacity, symptoms that something momentous is happening. I haven't seen anything like this in a long time." Novelist David Grossman, who participated in the writing of the Geneva Accord, said he sees a similar awakening. "People have begun to try to break free from the paralysis in which we were trapped for the past three years, years when we were so frozen in our fears, in our suspicion and hatred, that there was no new thinking."

It was simply past time to speak out, Avraham Burg told me in October. "People had stopped asking questions," he said, "and stopped giving answers." Burg, a Labor Knesset Member who served as Speaker from 1999 to 2003, wrote a surprisingly vehement condemnation of Israeli actions in a widely translated September op-ed, which set the tonefor much of what followed. "Israel," Burg wrote, "having ceased to care about the children of the Palestinians, should not be surprised when they come washed in hatred and blow themselves up in the centers of Israeli escapism." With four children currently serving in the army, Burg suggested to me he had particular cause to raise his voice: "For the past thirty-five years," he said, "we have pursued a stupid policy, which sacrifices our children on the altar of settlements, and nobody was saying a thing."

Though serious doubts remain about the highly touted Geneva agreement, it has undermined Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's oft-repeated excuses for delay. "For three years," Burg, another architect of Geneva, says, "the government was happy to have no partner. The burden of responsibility was lifted off their shoulders. But we came and said, 'There is a partner and a partnership.'" The strategies of the Sharon government, which has devoted itself assiduously for three years to pacifying the electorate rather than resolving the conflict, seem to have run aground.

However, the deepest roots of this sudden outbreak of straight talk lay elsewhere, in what Israelis quaintly call the "demographic problem." Nothing is more feared than being overwhelmed by the antagonistic population among whom they have so aggressively intermingled their own people for the past few decades. As Burg confided to me, "I am not afraid of weapons and terrorism. I am afraid of the day that all of them will put their weapons down and say, 'one man, one vote.'"

Veteran political commentator Akiva Eldar suggests that "the demographic threat has always been too theoretical, while the terror threat is all too tangible and personal." But this may no longer be the case. The newspapers are full of concerned editorials fretting over the prospect of a single state encompassing Israelis and Palestinians, alongside reports like the recent alarmist claim by Haifa professor Arnon Sofer that "there is already a non-Jewish majority" between the Jordan and the sea.

As Jeff Halper, an anthropologist and activist who is an expert on the built environment of the West Bank, explains, "for decades, settling the territories was an ongoing campaign, and the consequences were always going to be years down the line." While the government continues to give tacit support to new illegal outposts and authorize new housing starts on existing settlements, these are mere ornaments upon the massive enterprise; the major blocs are complete, the extensive road network is finished and the separation wall is on its way to completion. "Now it's done," Halper laughs, "and the right is coming face to face with the results."

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