Ending Role of Occupier Brings Joy to Tel Aviv

Standing amid his piles of ripe tomatoes and leafy stalks of celery, Goell George was weighing and bagging vegetables speedily for weekend shoppers--and talking politics even faster.

“We’re finally getting out of Gaza and bringing our boys back home,” George said. “I thought this day would never come. But, praise God, we are through with Gaza, and soon, I hope, we’ll be off the West Bank too.”

George, 60, who came from Afghanistan as a boy, is not one of the Israeli liberals who have been campaigning for years for withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and West Bank and recognition of the Palestinian right to self-determination.

He is a vegetable seller in Tel Aviv’s bustling Carmel Market, where political opinions are conservative, generally shouted and often punctuated with a bang of the fist on the table. Here, the right-wing Likud Party can usually count on 100% support from both the vendors and the shoppers.

“Who wanted to stay in Gaza? Nobody I know,” George said. “As for security, I think holding Gaza cost us more lives than it saved. Same way with the West Bank. I say, let the Palestinians decide themselves what to do. For us, it’s enough. We’re going.”

A deep satisfaction spread this weekend across Tel Aviv, the country’s coastal metropolis, as the meaning of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho sunk in and people savored the prospects of peace.

“It’s about time,” said David Yaakov, 42, who sells clothing in the market at a stall where his father, an immigrant from Iraq, had sold goods before him. “When people voted for (Prime Minister Yitzhak) Rabin and the Labor Party two years ago, this is what they wanted. You can criticize the deal Rabin did this way or that way, but the important thing is, we’ll be out.

“Look, in two years my son goes into the army. I hope he won’t have to fight as I did. At least I know he won’t be in Gaza and probably not on the West Bank. Who wants to raise a boy for 20 years, to be your pride and joy, and then see him die in Gaza?”

There were others criticizing the agreement on Palestinian self-government reached last week with the Palestine Liberation Organization, but in Tel Aviv they seemed a dissonant minority despite the full-scale Likud assaults on the Rabin government.

“Giving back Gaza is one thing--the only people who want it are the Palestinians,” Menahem Scherf, 33, said between sales of trays of eggs, “but the West Bank is another matter. First, there are 110,000 or 120,000 Israeli settlers there, and then there is a security question because it is actually very close to Tel Aviv. . . . I’d say, keep most of the West Bank.”

A fishmonger paused as he cleaned a couple of trout to comment: “Trust the Arabs? Never. An Arab will work for you 10, 15 years and then one day stab you in the back. Even if Palestinian autonomy begins well, that’s the way it will turn out--a knife in our back.”

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Shlomo Haim, 60, a retired steelworker who came to Israel as a teen-ager, acknowledged that Israelis are divided over the agreement but dismissed such comments as “mad shouting.”

“We have an army to defend us,” Haim said. “How can people forget that? We are strong militarily. The Palestinians cannot threaten us, and we won’t let them terrorize us. If those settlers are worried about their safety, they should return home to Israel. This peace is a good thing.”

At Cafe Nordau, a trendy bistro on Ben Yehuda Street, owner Benny Schlesinger observed that the agreement between Israel and the PLO had “released a lot of the tension among people--there was a relief, a relaxation, a sense of doing something very right.”

“I talk with hundreds of people every day,” said Schlesinger, 44, “and I know the mood of Tel Aviv. Ninety-nine percent of the people here are happy with this agreement, most of them very happy, and those who are angry are a bitter minority.

“People have had it up to here with war,” he said, using his hand to draw a line well over his head. “And this occupation is war in another form. . . . We will have to work at making peace work, we will have to be patient with the PLO, we will maintain our security so people feel easy, but all this we can do.”

Others go further and see the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and later from the West Bank as a liberation for Israel as well as the place they are starting to call, with a bit of a catch in the throat, Palestine.

“This is the best thing to happen to Israel since the state was founded in 1948,” said Havatselet Arnon, 31, a sound technician at the Cameri Theater here. “In 1967, we fought a war we had to fight to defend Israel, but we got into a very dangerous situation psychologically and morally when we kept the West Bank and Gaza and started to rule over another people.

“We are supposed to be the only true democracy in the Middle East, but occupying another country contradicts all notions of democracy. Our soldiers felt they could do anything to Arabs in the (occupied) territories. That feeling spread to Israel, so we all looked on Arabs as less than human. And we forced young men, just out high school, to be part of this--or go to jail.”

Dalia Binder, 38, a real estate agent, made the point even more graphically. “We take an 18-year-old who barely knows himself, give him a gun and tell him to decide whether to kill another boy who has a stone in his hand,” she said. “This changes someone for life, and after almost 27 years, two generations of Israelis have been shaped in this way.”

For Gidi Orsher, 44, a film critic, the lengthy Israeli occupation had changed the country into “a place where we don’t care much, at least as much as we used to, about one another.”

“When I was young and we heard a soldier had died, it was a national tragedy, something everyone felt,” he said. “Now, who cares? We lost our innocence with the occupation, and over the years it hardened us. Those years seemed to take everything bad and distill it into government policy.

“The whole debate about whether to stay or go shows how cynical we have become. We think only of ourselves--is this good for Israel or bad? We look to only our own needs without thinking that what would be good for the other could also be good for us.”

For Arnon, Binder, Orsher and many other Israeli liberals, the agreement on Palestinian autonomy thus becomes a redeeming act for Israel itself.

“Taking the freedom of another nation is a terrible thing,” Arnon said, “but giving it back is wonderful, for us and for them.”

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Baruch Ben-Anat, 68, a retired businessman, and his wife, Zevaha, also 68, consider themselves “people of the moderate center,” and for them the retreat from Gaza and the West Bank will be a return to the Zionism they have supported from their youth.

“I want a state that is Jewish and democratic,” Ben-Anat said, “and not a state that will have a minority of nearly 50% Arabs or that deprives those people of their civil rights.

“But it has taken us time to understand the implications of remaining in Gaza and the West Bank. We were happy after the 1967 war because we thought it completed the (1948) War of Independence and brought us the whole Land of Israel. But, really, we had to make a choice--Israel as a Jewish state with less land but at peace, or Greater Israel with so many Arabs and no peace.”