This failure has a father

This one-man protest movement appeared to have missed the boat: Election time rolled around and the two chief culprits, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, were re-elected. But Ashkenazi kept up the vigil. At a certain stage, he was invited for a talk with Dayan, who explained that his protest was futile: "The people have said their piece, and no demonstration or rally will bring down the government."

That was Dayan's second miscalculation. Ashkenazi persisted, attracting protest movements from all over the country. Within three months, Golda's administration was forced to resign, leading, in the end, to the political upheaval of 1977.

Motti Ashkenazi is a fairy-tale hero when one considers the apathy displayed by the public today, confronting the lethal combination of political-military crisis and social-economic despair. Suicide bombings have turned our lives into a kind of death by lottery. No one knows where the ax will fall or who will be next.

The security situation has changed the way we live. People keep their distance from public places; tourists and investors keep their distance from Israel; the economy is in the dumps; and unemployment is sky-high. While the citizens of this country are being called up for emergency reserve duty and the IDF is fighting a war in the territories, two-thirds of the ultra-Orthodox males don't work or serve in the army.

And no one protests; no one fills the public squares. In our wildest dreams, we wouldn't have believed that Sharon, an army man all his life, would vote in favor of the Tal Law, people said, while rushing home to watch Yatzpan clowning around on TV.

The shock of the terror attacks is also short-lived: People are horrified; they ask each other what will be; and life goes on. There's a kind of morbid acceptance of the situation. It applies to what the Palestinians do to us, and also what we do to them. It has a lot to do with the fact that both Sharon and Bush blame everything on Arafat and the Palestinians, as if there's nothing we can do but sit and wait for Godot.

According to a public opinion poll on the state of national security in 2002 conducted by Prof. Asher Arian, Israelis have toughened their views on security in general, and their willingness to compromise in particular. Support of Oslo has declined from 58 percent last year to 38 percent this year. Support of a Palestinian state (in the wake of a peace agreement) has gone from 57 percent to 49 percent. Willingness to hand over Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem to the Palestinians has dropped from 51 percent to 40 percent. Altogether, 41 percent of the respondents said that Palestinian violence had negatively affected their readiness to make concessions, compared with 10 percent last year.

Journalists reported late last week on Sharon's carefree, light-hearted banter at cabinet meetings. "If things go on this way, Sharon won't have to run for a second term. He'll slide in," said a polling expert. With chilling satisfaction, one reporter wrote that the attack at Hebrew University won us points in the battle for public opinion - as if terrorist attacks were something to look forward to. So how many points do we get for Sunday's six attacks, with their 13 dead?

There is no correlation between what happens and doesn't happen and how the public responds. Israelis are either apathetic, or don't understand that this colossal failure has a father and that his name is Sharon. True, the state wasn't in great shape when he got it; but within two years, he's taken us light years backward.

The man they said was bursting with creative thinking hasn't come up with a single new thought on how to break the cycle of bloodshed. The great strategist has turned out to be a petty tactician, focused on his own survival. If Sharon has any say in the matter, he would just as soon stay in power like Golda and be re-elected like Golda, even if it means doing as Golda did and taking us all to hell.

What more has to happen for the public to shake off its apathy and say: "We've had it up to here?"

By Yoel Marcus

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------