We Don’t Lack Problems — But There Is Just As Much Good Stuff Too

There are scores of illuminated spots in Israeli society and in its government — but yet, on our side we prefer to always see total blackness around us and whip ourselves with self-hatred.

Based on our media coverage in the first days of 2011, it looks like everything’s lost: the prime minister’s office is collapsing; the government is falling apart; the political situation is a catastrophe; the state of Israel is sort of “the people shall dwell alone”; our security is faltering and a new Yom Kippur [War] is waiting for us; our society is flat on its face; everything we touch is corrupt. And what about the future? Heaven forbid, — that’s the verdict of wise men in the press and in politics.

Can that be for real? Let’s take a few steps back to the beginning of 2010. I remember, once I came to have my hair cut at Shlomo’s, my hairdresser — when he and his son attacked me with the question, “Tell us, should we prepare protective kits?”* Seeing my great surprise at the question, they elaborated, “Don’t you read the papers? Don’t you watch TV? There is going to be a war this summer — this is for sure, that’s what all write and say.”

I answered him, “Shlomo, there’s going to be no war. Let’s place bet: should there be no war, you will do my hair for free for a year. Should it be otherwise — I’ll pay you double for two years.”

Reading the dreadful articles which prophesied a war in the summer of 2010, the profusion of arguments mobilized for this purpose, the intimidations and accusations against our leadership — it is incredible! Just so that we are clear, the state of Israel has numerous security threats, both big and small. Israel has known such threats each and every year since its founding. The wisdom of the national security policy has always been to neutralize and to minimize them, and if not an option — to delay the realization of their potential for as long as possible.

Let’s take a look at the sphere of statecraft. The rise of President Obama set in the face of the Israeli government an unusual challenge: either because he was a president lacking any emotional kinship to the state of Israel, or because of his different political perceptions and his own world outlook, or because of the contempt and overt hostility he demonstrated towards Prime Minister Netanyahu.

More Polemic Is Yet to Come

What hasn’t already been predicted here in strong language: Obama is going to trample us down and all we have left to do is to bow down before him; they have given us the parade of horrors — after he passes his health care reform, he’s going to impose on us a capitulation plan and crush Bibi like a fly; and after they asserted with aplomb that when the congressional elections are past, he would take revenge on Bibi and our end is close; and when Hillary Clinton addressed the AIPAC conference not long ago, the headlines announced that from now on, she’s taking over and is about to give us cruel ultimatums.

So what happened to all of these prophesies (or heart’s desires)? So far — nothing. It appears that Bibi is the one who has managed to set the rules for the Obama administration — which do not involve surrendering Israeli vital interests. Moreover, on the security-strategic level, the Israeli-American relationship has only tightened.

Furthermore, in the heat of the wild media-political passion to see Obama smashing Netanyahu (meaning, us — the citizens of the country), they did not see fit to underscore that both Obama and Hillary have repeatedly declared what the Palestinians don’t want to hear: that the state of Israel is a state of the Jewish people, and that the Jewish people have a deep historical affinity to the land of Israel.

We don’t lack serious political problems, and locking horns constantly with the American administration is foreseeable; it is clear as well that Bibi will not be able to continue by only masterly maneuvering around the situation — but in the end, he will have to step out with a state initiative for peace (a parallel to the Arab Peace Initiative).

But why see only black? Why flog ourselves all the time with an unfathomable self-hatred? Why not to lift up our eyes onto all those lit-up windows in our civilian society, and also in slew of governmental bodies?

*Translator’s Note: The author served as senior intelligence adviser to the prime minister on Arab affairs (today an intelligence consultant and lecturer).