cannabisnews.com: Israel Waits for Godot





Israel Waits for Godot
Posted by CN Staff on January 18, 2003 at 21:26:40 PT
By Thomas L. Friedman
Source: New York Times 
Tel Aviv — Maybe the most telling fact in this coming Israeli election is that at this moment of intense crisis, a tiny Israeli party, Green Leaf, which advocates the legalization of marijuana, could win one or two seats in the new parliament. Green Leaf's motto might as well be: since every other solution has been tried and failed, why not just get high?I've covered a lot of Israeli elections, but I have never seen one like this. I've never seen the Israeli public less interested in the two major parties — indeed, in the whole event. 
The reasons are not hard to discern. The last two years of suicide bombings and collapsed peace have knocked the stuffing out of this place.It is not that Israelis are about to surrender. The Palestinian fantasy that the Jews will just pick up and leave if you turn the heat up on them high enough was so wrong, so foolish. (You should see the number of concerts and theater and dance performances in Tel Aviv on any given evening.) Nevertheless, there is a deep and growing sense among Israelis of "No Exit," a sense that every idea has been tried — peace overtures, crackdowns, settlements, targeted killings, the left-wing solution and the right-wing solution, and nothing works. As an Israeli friend told me over dinner: "You look at your kids and your grandkids now and you ask yourself: What if it never ends?"This anguish helps explain some of the bizarre politics surrounding the Jan. 28 vote — and not only the emergence of the make-dope-not-war Green Leaf party. While all the polls show Mr. Sharon's Likud Party gaining the most votes, it seems to be more out of old loyalties and a sense that Mr. Sharon is a better shield for Israelis to hide behind than out of any conviction that he has any solutions.Meanwhile, Likud's main rival, the Labor Party under Amram Mitzna, has the plan most Israelis prefer: separation from the Palestinians. But pessimism that any plan will work anymore has limited Mr. Mitzna's appeal. "People are in fear — they are in a psychology of shock," Mr. Mitzna told me as we rode around one morning. "They have lost confidence that you are able to negotiate with the other side, so they stick to what they know — even if it is not working. What I am trying to bring is logic and the truth, but people are thinking from their guts."Because neither Labor nor Likud will win enough parliament seats to rule alone, they will be more dependent than ever on the small parties, with their narrow primordial agendas: from the anti-religious parties to the ultrareligious parties, to the pro-Israeli Arab parties, to the Israeli Russian parties, to the pro-Sephardic Jews party.What is amazing is that these smaller tribal parties are likely to get more than half the seats in the next parliament. So more than half of the next parliament will consist of parties that offer the wider society no answers to its deepest national concerns: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the economy, the social divisions. It is as if America was having an election in the midst of the Civil War, and more than half the parties had no position on slavery.This is not an accident. Israelis actually favor, by a large majority, a national unity government. They want to feel united. But in the absence of a leader or party that can offer that, many retreat into tribal dens that are built around one Israeli tribe negating the other — secular versus the religious, Sephardic Orthodox versus Ashkenazi Orthodox, Russian immigrants versus everybody else."Israelis are skeptical about peace right now, but they badly want a border," says Moshe Halbertal, an Israeli philosopher. "They want a border so that any Palestinian in the West Bank can't just walk over and kill an Israeli. They want an end to this war of all against all where there is no front line. They don't expect peace with the Palestinians, but they want a front for the war with Palestinians. They want a border for a Jewish democratic state. . . ."But I think," he added, "that they would also like a leader with a serious domestic national agenda, someone who has ideas on how Israelis can live together and heal all of the internal divisions — someone who would be culturally inclusive, religiously respectful, educationally compassionate and diplomatically hardheaded. They are looking for an Israeli Third Way."In short, the leader Israelis crave is someone who can both build a border with the Palestinians and take down the borders among the Jews. Unfortunately, the Messiah is not on the ballot in this election. Source: New York Times (NY)Author:  Thomas L. FriedmanPublished: January 19, 2003Copyright: 2003 The New York Times Company Contact: letters nytimes.com Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ Related Articles:Letter From Israel - Keep on the Grasshttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15130.shtmlFringe Parties Hope to Woo Israel Votershttp://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15085.shtmlThe Wrong Drug Front - Ha`aretz Daily http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread14851.shtmlDrug Trade Thrived in Biblical Times http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread13663.shtml 
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