During the trip, however, I was terribly shaken by what I saw in Israel. Of course, I had been reading the news stories during the past two years of the deteriorating political situation and the apparent glee of the regime in seeing the situation deteriorate even further. I have been reading, and I have been reacting through my writings. I have been studying political science in an effort to understand how any government could turn their back so completely on the wishes of the people who had elected them, and destroy the very foundations of the State's existence. None of what I read, none of what I wrote, and none of what I studied, prepared me in the least for the situation I actually encountered when I set foot on Israeli soil and opened a newspaper.
During five years of campus activism, and three years before that in high school, I had heard the line repeated ad infinitum that Israel is the only true democracy in the Middle East, and therefore is deserving of American patronage. I now find that this is a myth of horrendous proportions. No less than four times during my three week stay in Israel did the police exhibit unprovoked brutality toward peaceful demonstrators. Horses were used to trample elderly men, women, and children who were walking silently on the sidewalk carrying signs. Police officers used police vehicles to purposefully run over demonstrators in the streets, and then to leave without offering assistance to the injured. Civil rights of protestors, not to mention those who were only marginally involved or bystanders, are no longer paid any heed in the pursuit of government policies that have been proven to be detrimental to the country.
The Rabin junta completed a framework for the second-stage agreement with the PLO during my trip. This agreement was debated briefly by the cabinet and passed over the objections of three cabinet ministers, to whom the Prime Minister responded by saying "I don't need to listen to your objections". Rabin then also disclosed that he has absolutely no intention of bringing this agreement to the Knesset for debate, out of fear that he would lose the vote. Democracy has thereby been totally dispensed with in Israel.
Also during my stay, the leader of the left-wing extremist party, Meretz, ordered the broadcasting equipment of the only religious radio station, which is also the only voice of the opposition, to be destroyed. It is the purview of the left to champion human rights in most scenarios, but in Israel, it is precisely they who are the first to trample on them. Without the Freedom of expression by the press, democracy cannot function. This same lunatic, Shulamit Aloni, has also called for the most elite troops in the Israel Defense Forces to be disbanded simply because they are religious, and have decided to obey their rabbis' edict to refuse orders that run counter to their conscience. If only German army units had done this in World War Two, how many more Jews would be alive today?
Visiting teenagers touring the Old City of Jerusalem with Israeli flags had the banners ripped from their hands by Israeli police out of fear that the Arabs would react strongly to the flag-waving. Isn't it ironic that in the heart of all Judaism is the only place in the world where a Jew must fear for waving an Israeli flag, while at the same time the enemies of the Jews are free to do what they want.
During the last week of my trip, a mob of roving Arabs fell upon a Jewish town in central Israel burning and looting everything in their path. A synagogue was destroyed, its Torah scrolls taken out and burned. Tens of Jewish children were injured, stones were thrown at women, and nearby buildings were broken into, looted, and in some cases, destroyed. In any other country in the world, this would be called a pogrom. In Israel, the police and army took an hour to respond. During that time, the local security chief, not a member of the national forces, fired his gun into the air in an effort to disperse the mob. Another resident fired his gun also, hitting one of the mob and killing him. When the police finally did arrive, the two residents were arrested, and no moves were made against the Arabs. When a similar incident took place in a Brooklyn slum neighbourhood, the police chief was forced to resign, and the mayor lost his re-election bid. In Israel it is another footnote to add to the history of the fall of Israel.
In the midst of all this, two events grabbed my attention. The first took place on Tisha B'Av. Even though the fast began immediately follwing the Shabbat, when most people were unable to travel great distances to hear the reading of the book of Lamentations customary on that night, 150,000 people still showed up at the Western Wall to cry, to pray, to mourn our national loss. An additional 50,000 people showed up in front of the Prime Minister's residence to take part in the reading of Lamentations at a program organized by the Women In Green. At this program, the reading was followed by several divrei torah (sermons) given by Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, and by Nadia Matar. The whole group then walked, en masse, to the Old City, and walked along the Promenade above the walls of the Old City, converging on the Western Wall at around midnight.
The second event took place a couple of days later, during the afternoon rush hour. Demonstrators from around the country convereged on the country's major highway intersections at prcisely 5:30 and blocked the roads. The police had been forewarned of these demonstrations, and had made it plain that they would prevent traffic from being blocked and would arrest anyone who attempted to get in the way. The threats went unheeded, and the efforts of the police proved unsuccessful. More than fifty main intersections across the country were closed down by the demonstrators. At the entrance to Jerusalem from the Tel Aviv highway, the police were waiting with hundreds of officers in an effort to keep the road open. The demonstrators never showed up to this particular intersection, and the police, by their sheer numbers alone, ended up blocking the traffic by themselves. Over 100 demonstrators were arrested, and all but one of them were released within a few hours. At precisely 7:30, all the demonstrators left the roads, and traffic resumed. The traffic problems were not as bad as they could have been, since advisories went out on the radio before the deomnstrations started, and most people stayed at work late.
That these two events took place, and that such a high number of people took part in them, renewed my hope in the ultimate victory of Zionism and democracy over those in the Israeli government who would destroy both. What scares me no end is that such desperate measures are even necessary in a land where the Zionist dream was so far on the way to being realised.
What is perhaps the worst part of all of this is that no effort is being made in the Knesset to bring this government down and force early elections. No contingency exists for this possibility. Indeed, no special session of the Knesset was requested by the opposition to discuss the police brutality or the absence of democratic rights in Israel, nor was a motion of no confidence even suggested.