The Legacy of Solomon
Page 75
Laura could not help observing that the feelings of sympathy between international Jewish communities and Israel had weakened as the conflict between Israel and Palestine continued and the inflexible position of Israeli governments. By her mother, according to Jewish tradition, she could have claimed to be a Jew, but her father was a French Catholic and she had been brought up in the Catholic religion having little contact with the Jewish community or Jews of her own age. Intermarriage had had its toll on Irish Jewry and this together with immigration had reduced the community to a pittance.
Over the centuries there was a strong bond between Jewish communities, wherever they lived, however, as Israel developed with its own specific national identity as a modern state with its internal politics the links had weakened. Isolated communities gradually disappeared as immigration to Israel took in those who had been rejected or who were in danger. Modern Israel had become a regional superpower, a modern state with powerful allies and armed with the ultimate weapon of dissuasion capable of affronting and defeating any of its neighbours.
Laura had not been born at the time of the Six-Day War in 1967, when there was powerful emotional support for an encircled Israel, David against the Arab Goliath, but she had been old enough to remember the plight of Soviet Jews.
Though she had not been brought up in the Jewish religion she had nevertheless a keen awareness of her Jewish family’s history, but she like many of the younger generation felt little, or at least less, in common with the brash present day Israel and the religious traditions of the past that had been the traditions of her parents. But the continuing conflict between Israel and Palestine, and above all its brutal reprisals in Gaza and the Lebanon sapped the sympathy felt after each terrorist attack in Israel.
Bombings and suicide attacks had become everyday events currency, Iraq, Lebanon, London, New York, Madrid and Egypt, the list was long. There was little in common between defenceless innocent tourists in a Bali restaurant and an all powerful Tsahal firing rockets on Palestinians from airborne gunships to defend Israeli settlers in Palestinian territory. The infernal cycle of reprisals had slowly eroded sympathy for the Palestinians people, transforming the Israeli army into aggressors.
Nightly images of Palestinian camps bombarded in Israel or in the Lebanon did little to prevent the image of Israel from being transformed into that of an aggressor without feelings, no different to the Lebanese army that bombarded Palestinian camps around the clock, transforming them into ruins and desolation as the world turned a blind eye.
Since her arrival in Israel she felt very little in common with the traditional Jews she had observed, the way they dressed, the way they thought and more specifically their religion. On occasions she had seen Orthodox Jews in Paris, she had seen films and photos of such people, but those she saw praying in such religious fervour, balancing their bodies backwards and forwards, at the Wall had as little in common with her as the Eskimos in Nanook of the North. But was worse was she felt little in common with modern Israel and its people, once she had admired it, now she did not understand it and in many ways. She knew nothing of their language and little of the history of the Jewish diaspora, its divisions and traditions, in short she had nothing in common with Israel other than a tenuous notion of ancestral religion. She was more attached to the history of a peaceful Ireland, yes a peaceful Ireland, that of the republic, a pastoral country, whose troubles were nothing in comparison to the convulsions of Israel. Her live had been lived and influenced by the world around her in Paris, forming her own ideas and opinions, untouched by any feeling of a narrow community whose persecution was both real and imagined.
Whenever she watched the TV reports on events in Israel and the Occupied Territories she could not avoid seeing an unequal conflict, but the David was a Palestinian, not a Jew, even if she felt no particular sympathy for the Arabs. She had often listened to Jewish acquaintances in Paris talk of their hatred for the Arabs, but she had not expected to see such an enormous difference between the economic conditions of the two peoples. On arrival in Israel she had been almost astonished to discover what resembled a modern southern European country, not unlike Greece.
Bethlehem was already another world compared to that of Tel-Aviv. Her previous impressions of Palestine were those of Yasser Arafat’s fighters holding Kalashnikovs and their keffiyeh, their raised clenched fists and terrorist attacks. But in Gaza she discovered ordinary Palestinians on the other side of the wire fence living in extreme misery and poverty. It was they who were encircled, by what was in comparison a superpower, an enemy armed with modern technology and supported by massive American military aid.
The news had announced a thirty billion dollar arms programme for Israel whilst the Palestinians suffered as Europe held back a few tens millions of dollars food aid and Israel withheld payment of added value taxes. The difference in scale was dizzying.
Times had changed from when Israel was a small weak nation surrounded by belligerent Arab states armed by the Soviet Union. The table had been turned, Egypt, Jordan, Syria not to speak of Iraq had their own problems. The rich Arab countries were more concerned with managing the petro-dollar wealth. It was time that a compromise was found, but Israel had set out its own future by allowing the development of settlements transforming the West Bank into a chequered quilt of colonies, illegal in the eyes of international law, creating a bone of contention for future generations.
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The War Against Terrorism