by Yoram Getzler. I was on the bus the other day. On the hour, I could faintly hear the beep, beep, beep heralding the radio news-on-the-hour.
Then something unusual happened, or to be more precisely descriptive; what I was used to happening did not!
For all, the years I have been here, when the hourly news comes on, the passengers quiet, and the bus driver automatically as a Pavlovian instinct, turns up the volume. I do not know if anyone has timed this action, to the microsecond, but it is extremely fast and up until now, without fail, as if it were part of the training course the bus drivers take. Perhaps there is even competition within the student group for the fastest most accurate action.
In the past, if the driver missed the first few seconds of news, a passenger was sure to remind him to turn up the sound.
But the other day…nothing. In the background of street noise and normal passenger conversation, the news remained in the distant. I am not sure anybody else noticed.
For me this was the ultimate confirmation of my suspicion that we have been experiencing the calmest, quietest time in our collective memories. Memories that are usually fraught, with news of terror attacks wars and other looming catastrophes.
These days, news broadcasts are beginning with news of cops & robbers…of corruption and social issue demonstrations.
Egypt and the turmoil among our neighbors also has taken an honorable early place in our media news
consciousness. But the traditional threats and hostile actions against us were more immediate and totally local. Recently they have definitely been reduced to some kind of tolerable background sounds. This is especially true if one lives in the main cities; Jerusalem Tel-Aviv, Haifa. At the moment there are no bombs going off in our restaurants and buses, on our streets or in our personal space and so far, the rockets do not reach us.
While this is not equally true of people living near or even far from Gaza, and south Lebanon, it is happening for the vast majority of Israelis.
The threats by our neighbors, close and far away, Palestinians to Iranians has receded like a high tide gone out to sea. One might hope that this tide would take with it or at least reduce the flotsam and jetsam of our fear concern and some of the awareness energy that is required to survive
So, how does that reflect in our consciousness and politics?
Ironically, at the moment, there is definitely far less talk of our need to make changes and/or concessions regarding the Arab world and/or the Palestinians. Truthfully we do not even need to think about them much. At the moment it truly seems that “they are there; we are here!”.
However sadly, this new found aura of long sought for “normality” does not seem to have had much positive or creative political effect.
Many elements in the current government and some of its Knesset members continues to promote and emphasize a defensive aggressive deer like frozen in the headlights mentality.
This (most probably temporary) period of quiet is not being taken advantage of. I think it is the proper time to awaken from the stupor of a non-threatening summer (with a few exceptions) and take advantage of this time to try and effect some positive change in our relationship with the Palestinians in particular and the wide world in general.
Now for the first time in a long time, any changes, any new initiatives will not be able to be credited to our fear, to the violence against us. Hamas can not claim that it terrorized us into anything. The opposite; now is the time we can demonstrate that our impulse to deal with the issues confronting us can be and are made best when we are not under direct daily attack. Now we can show that we are not limited in our ability to understand to the strength and violence of our enemy. As some Palestinians say about us (and we say about them) “All they understand is strength (violence, threat)!”
