The Undoing of the Entebbe Legacy

We Israelis are expert in the rituals of collective grief. In times of war or terrorist attacks, the radio plays unbearably beautiful Hebrew songs about death and longing and love for the land of Israel. We know how to weep for strangers as though they were family and to mourn for loved ones with restraint. Most of all, we know how to turn pain into defiance, counter death with the more compelling details of daily life.

But in the course of the past two weeks, something went wrong with our response mechanism. As one bomb after another transformed places of public normalcy into pilgrimage sites of prayer and rage, Israelis felt a new and very un-Israeli emotion: helplessness. And as passengers became pedestrians rather than ride a bus and parents kept children from the local mall, we saw ourselves becoming a different people, defeated by fear and impotence.

My friend Tali decided to send her two daughters to stay “for awhile” with family in the U.S. “This place is turning into Sarajevo,” she said. I wanted to tell her, “We have to be strong, not yield to terror, remember that we’ve survived harder times.” But I couldn’t repeat any of those reassurances that Israelis used to offer one another. When your government projects confusion and your army indecision and your fabled intelligence service ignorance, the collective will dissolves into individual survival instinct, every Israeli family for itself.

Israel was founded as the antithesis to Jewish passivity. Jews emerged from the Holocaust as politically and religiously fractured as we ever were, with one exception: We all agreed that, from now on, we would learn to protect ourselves and each other. In a single generation, we went from being mocked as a people who go like sheep to slaughter to a people condemned for their supposed militarism--an ironic measure of progress. The symbol of that almost instant transformation was the Entebbe rescue of 1976, when commandos flew over hostile Arab territory and halfway across Africa to retrieve 100 hijacked fellow Israelis from Uganda. There was nothing we weren’t prepared to do to save Jewish lives.

Last week was the reversal of Entebbe. Prime Minister Shimon Peres promised war against the Hamas terrorists, but we knew he didn’t really mean it. He wouldn’t send commandos into Yasser Arafat’s Gaza to systematically hit Hamas leaders and operation centers because that would embarrass Arafat on the Palestinian street and compromise the peace process. And so, instead, Peres is convening an international conference on terrorism and pressuring Arafat to pressure Hamas--words, the weapons of impotence.

For the first time in our history, self-defense no longer seems our primary goal. The peace process has allowed the emergence of a massive Hamas infrastructure in the territories vacated by the Israeli army, resulting in the worst terrorist attacks in our history. Worst of all, the process has tied our hands, denying us freedom of action against terrorists.

Not surprisingly, the Holocaust has resurfaced in Israeli political debate. “This isn’t peace, it’s a holocaust,” read one anguished poster taped to the wall of Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Center, the shopping mall where one Hamas suicide bomber carried out his heinous crime. At the scene of one of the two recent bus massacres in Jerusalem, a man paraded a live sheep draped with a sheet on which were written the terrible words, “Like sheep to slaughter.” Since the Holocaust, our great nightmare hasn’t been that some new enemy would try to destroy us again but that we would somehow forget our resolve, forget how to defend ourselves. Now that seems to be happening.

Still, the Holocaust rhetoric is exaggerated and dangerous. It can lead to acts of apocalyptic desperation. Just last week, Yigal Amir, on trial for assassinating Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, testified that he acted to stop the peace process, which, he insisted, would turn Jews into “soap in Arafat’s crematoria.”

The onus is on the Israeli government to expose those fears as hysterical by restoring our self-confidence. We know there is no way to entirely uproot terrorism, let alone suicide bombings. But we need to feel that we are still able to fight back.

For increasing numbers of Israelis, the peace process is becoming synonymous with self-emasculation. Unless Peres convinces us that the peace process is not a mortal threat to our families, we will vote him out in the coming national election. The most basic premise of any government’s contract with its citizens is to ensure their existence. For Israelis afraid to leave their homes, that covenant has been shattered.