Tzipi, Israel and the Gray Lady

The New York Times Magazine’s recent profile of Tzipi Livni is too lengthy to be dealt with in a single post, but a few issues spring immediately to attention. For one, the Times is once again (forgive the egregious pun) decidedly behind the times. With his successful survival of the Lebanon war report, appointment of Ehud Barak and installment of Shimon Peres in the presidency, Olmert seems to have outmaneuvered his opposition despite his low poll numbers. Tzipi’s half-rebellion non-rebellion hasn’t endeared her much to Israeli voters and, in country at least, the hype seems to be off. The profile doesn’t do a bad job of profiling Tzipi’s slightly bizarre charm (she somehow makes her total lack of charisma come off as charisma, don’t ask me how) but then meanders off into a general assessment of the conflict and Israel’s current historical-strategic position which, to me at least, appears to exist wholly in the mind of the reporter in question.

Israelis these days fret about how they are seen. They like to convey the spirit of the underdog — that of Israel’s heroic beginnings — as if discomfited by the adornments of an increasingly moneyed, Americanized and postheroic society. More powerful than ever, Israelis are also more anxious than ever, a paradox with U.S. parallels that they find maddening. Israel’s strength and wealth grow, but the country’s long-term security does not grow with them. The shekel rises; so does the billowing smoke just over the border in Gaza. Two Israeli withdrawals, from Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005, have ended up bolstering two groups that the West and Israel brand as terrorists — Hezbollah and Hamas. Some Israelis, watching the black-masked militia of Hamas take over Gaza, have taken to calling the benighted sliver of territory “Hamastan.”

This is a fairly typical American liberal conception of Israel: namely, that Israel is somehow an historical failure if it is not accepted by its enemies. One could easily argue that Israel’s consistently growing economic strength is essential to its long term security and that a rising shekel is, in some ways, as important to the survival of the Jewish state as a peace treaty, perhaps more so. Countries go through revolutions, peace treaties fail, situations destabilize, but economic growth and development are what solidifies and ensures a country’s future. That billowing smoke and that benighted territory over the border are just that: over the border. Not us and not our responsibility. They are now an external danger, and having the military, economic and political strength to deal with external dangers is not particularly discomfiting, as far as I can tell, to me or most other Israelis.

The reporter seems firmly ensconced in the Oslo mythology of peace as messianic savior. The fact that Israel grows stronger while peace grows more elusive is counter-intuitive to such thinking and nearly impossible to understand. Thus we find Hamas and Hezbollah’s rise to power ascribed to Israel’s withdrawals rather than to internal factors or general Western fecklessness. The first was Hamas’ key to power and the second Hezbollah’s. This isn’t particularly surprising, since first hand experience has taught me the sad state of foreign journalism over here, with lazy and ideologically fettered reporters incapable of speaking Hebrew or Arabic biding their time in the Jerusalem bubble and soaking up the English-language gossip without a clue as to what the rest of the country (i.e. all of us) are thinking. I have a vivid memory of being at a media conference where Steven Erlanger, the Times’ Jerusalem journeyman, remarked that the government wanted to cover up the lack of sufficient water in the field during the Lebanon war. The fact that Israel’s reservists were probably cell-phoning their families en masse to report such things didn’t seem to enter his mind. You can’t keep such things secret for long with a citizen army. This kind of basic ignorance of Israeli society and how it works is, unfortunately, fairly universal amongst the journalistic glitterati who pontificate on Israel and its neuroses while shunning all contact with the country to which they are dispensing their apparently indispensable advice.