My Melancholy Bibi

"Israel was not created in order to disappear. It is the child of hope." John F. Kennedy

In my over 5 decades of fumbling attempts at something approaching journalism, I have enjoyed the opportunity for travel. Interviews in Berlin, London, Mexico, Jamaica, Ireland, Paris and others. But I have travelled to Israel the most, 4 trips in all. And those trips were during a war, a peace deal, and other events. I have been in Gaza for an interview with the Hamas military commander there, a Temu version of Patton with a big, ivory-handled Colt on his hip, and talked to both Israeli and Palestinian officials.

And despite all that is going on, I have great affection for all those I met during those trips. That's why what is happening now is, I think, tragic, and the JFK quote above is being put in jeopardy.

Firstly, the Holy Land is just an astonishing place, whether you belong to one of the three major faiths or not. I'll start with a small travelogue.

As a Christian, I have walked through the Garden of Gethsemane, visited the site of the miracle of loaves and fishes, the small chapel on the hill where the Sermon on the Mount was reputed to have taken place, the ruins of the temple where Jesus taught as a boy, and walked the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem that ends at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which contains the last 5 stations of the cross.

I have prayed with Jewish Israelis at the Western Wall of the Old Temple. At the time of my first visit in 1991, my wife and I were trying to become parents without much luck. One tradition at the Wall is to write a short prayer on a slip of paper and place it in a crack in the wall. I did so, like the woman above, and years later, on my last visit, I went back and wrote a thank-you as we had adopted our dear Mary Brigid.

I have stood and watched hundreds of men praying at the Dome of the Rock, where Muhammad is reputed to have ascended into Heaven.

I have visited St. David's Cathedral the seat of the Anglican Diocese of East Jerusalem, directed by a Palestinian Archbishop, a Palestinian Quaker boys' school on the West Bank; the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem; and more.

Masada, the Sea of Galilee, and the caves of the Dead Sea Scrolls were crammed into trips along with many political interviews with both sides in the current conflict, including visits to settlements and Kibbutzim on the West Bank and Golan Heights.

All of that is frankly amazing, as you are knee-deep in history wherever you go. But the goodwill generated by the success of what was established as a home and haven for the world's oppressed Jewry was also home to a large Palestinian population of both Muslims and Christians, and that goodwill is ebbing away.

The two never mixed well, and conflict was the norm from the beginning. As the Anglican Archbishop told me, "Here, the Bible is like yesterday's newspaper." That conflict resulted in 4 full-fledged wars and many invasions, terrorist events, and bombardments in between.

Yeah, blowing each other's stuff to smithereens is pretty much the default setting here.

The hope for years was in what was called a two-state solution. A Palestinian state was to be created alongside Israel, probably on the West Bank of the Jordan River where 3.5 million Palestinians live, mostly as farmers, but also as tradesmen working in Israel. It almost happened under the Presidency of Bill Clinton, beginning with the Oslo Accords in 1994 between Prime Minister Rabin and PLO Chairman Arafat.

Yeah, well, good luck with that. A year later, Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing radical Israeli named Yigal Amir, and Arafat slunk away fearing the same fate. So here we are back at square minus-one.

After the West Bank was captured by Israel after the 1967 war, both native and newly arrived Israelis began building their own settlements. Though the international community has ruled this illegal, roughly as though the US had annexed part of Germany after the war, it continued. Israel disputes that, and now the settler community is roughly equal to the Palestinian population, and so widespread as to make any contiguous Palestinian state a practical impossibility.

And that was the whole idea.

Violence from both sides has marked the evolution of the relationship, and that culminated with the barbaric October 7, 2023 attacks on Israeli homes near Gaza, the other big Palestinian enclave. That led to 3 years of bloody attacks by the Israeli Defense Forces.

This has happened under the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a governing coalition that includes the most radical, pro-settler elements in the country and a collection of bulls who carry their own china shops with them.

Laws now in force provide, for example, the death penalty for a Palestinian killing an Israeli, but not if the situation is reversed. Israeli citizens and settlers are structurally exempt or unlikely to face prosecution. The IDF, a venerated institution in Israel, has turned a blind eye to settler violence and stood by while Palestinian families have been terrorized.

From the newspaper Haaretz...

On Sunday, the IDF barred Israelis from entering the predominantly Christian West Bank village of Taybeh, citing recent "violent attacks by Israelis in the region." Footage from the village outskirts taken earlier that day showed settlers assaulting Palestinians and human rights activists.

In the village of Qusra, settlers set up an outpost in the yard of a Palestinian house, barricading access to the home with boulders and leaving the family living in it besieged and isolated from the rest of the village.

A Haaretz investigation published in December described how, with IDF support, settlers have been driving Palestinians from their homes in Area B – where civilian matters are handled by the Palestinian Authority – through harassment, threats, violence and vandalism.

A village resident told Haaretz that 40 minutes after they called the police, settlers in IDF uniform arrived and descended on the yard of the family's home in Qusra and erected a makeshift structure beside the wall of the house, with IDF soldiers later joining them in prayer.

To be fair, expelling Palestinians goes back to even the legendary David Ben-Gurion, who advocated it. But the latest crew of leaders have taken that to blue-ribbon levels, to the point of one Cabinet member saying there is no such thing as a Palestinian People. The incendiary rhetoric has hit DEFCON 1, and it seems that even moderate Palestinian leaders are powerless to counter it.

Well, that would be the case if they had the courage to speak out and truly negotiate. This being the Middle East, though, the knee-jerk response is more violence. You know, an eye for an eye for an eye for an eye for...

To be fair, yes again, like the cowardly Yasser Arafat, the Palestinians have done themselves no favors with random acts of violence, but the current Israeli leadership has succeeded in what many thought impossible. They have managed to squander the world's sympathy and support.

That shows some real talent for negative PR from Bibi, a man with all the charm of Jimmy Hoffa.

The hope of any ultimate solution to this conflict is fading fast, and as Netanyahu faces elections in the fall, and with corruption scandals surrounding him, he is growing more bellicose, hoping for a "rally 'round the flag" effect on the vote.

He may even have to ultimately give in on the big Trump statue in Gaza...

I still have hope, and I still love the ideals that created Israel. I have friends on both sides of this, and can only pray this moment passes, but it won't be easy, and the scars this group have inflicted on the country won't heal quickly.

The hope I have is in the words of an old reporter friend turned politician, Nitzan Horowitz. Ironically, we first met as we both covered the fall of the Berlin Wall in Germany. On my first visit to Israel during the First Gulf War, he showed me the West Bank under a 24-hour lockdown, with Israeli guards and checkpoints in and out. He lamented...

"We didn't survive the Inquisition, pogroms and Holocaust just so WE could now become the jailers."