Can things get worse in Israel/Palestine? Just wait a few days. Sharon will find a way. While everyone is looking at an invasion of Gaza or the elimination of Arafa, Sharon bombs Syria.

Israeli Security Barrier: Bar to Terror or to Peace?

To a visitor who last saw the West Bank a few days before the current uprising began in September 2000, the length of barrier already completed and the wider changes in the territory brought about by the intifada are a shock. Three years ago, an air of hope and growing normality prevailed. Mostly, Israelis and Jewish settlers moved safely through Palestinian areas, visiting casinos and shopping at roadside bazaars.

Now, the West Bank has the appearance of a wasteland. Life is mostly at a standstill, with big cities, as well as the towns and villages, cut off from one another by a maze of Israeli-built "bypass roads" — open to settlers but closed to most Palestinians — Israeli Army checkpoints and new concrete-slab walls and fencing and piles of bulldozed rubble blocking roads everywhere.

To a Westerner with a permit to travel the territory, it seems like an archipelago of brooding ghettos, of weary men, women and children crossing a patchwork quilt of checkpoints and barriers. East of Jerusalem, where only limited sections of the fence have been completed, it cuts across the hills near Bethlehem. North of Tel Aviv, at Palestinian cities like Qalqilya, which has been surrounded by the fence, farmers heading for their lands and children heading for school must reach gates operated by Israeli soldiers at the set opening hours, especially at dusk, or face camping out overnight.

The deep divide between Palestinians and Israelis is captured by the mood here and in Ariel. Ariel projects modernity and middle-class prosperity, with its blossom-lined avenues, attractive stone houses and apartment blocks, arts and sports centers, well-equipped hospitals and schools, and its own Japanese-financed mini-golf center. It is the citadel of settlements, a vision that the 230,000 Jewish settlers across the West Bank and Gaza, many still in trailers, see as their future.

Haris, barely two miles away, is deeply dispirited. Here, only two of the men, among a dozen who stopped to talk about the fence, had work of any kind. The men focused part of their recriminations on President Bush, dismissing as "theater" American pressure on the Israeli government over the fence. Mostly, they spoke of their fears.
[more]

The future can wait

In case you haven't noticed, the future has disappeared. And not necessarily because it looks bad. It's gone. No one talks about it. Even the Hebrew language, an important harbinger of Israeli trends is being spoken today chiefly in the present tense. Previously, it heralded the birth of a confused younger generation that can barely make itself understood with all the "likes" and "you knows" it uses for padding.

Army Radio, for example, has forgotten how to conjugate verbs. The noontime newscasters always say that the chief of
staff "says this morning," and the government "decides yesterday." But the real significance of this takeover of the present goes much deeper, of course. Here are a few explanations why the past and the future have only a bright present in this country.

Future shock: The Yom Kippur season is particularly appropriate for reminding us how obscure the future has been - sometimes even tomorrow afternoon - at critical points in Israeli history. Bitter surprises have created a fear of even thinking about the future. Rabin once said that Israeli intelligence has bungled things at every strategic juncture. At a conference this week on the Yom Kippur War, Dr. Ephraim Kam of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Strategic Research Center (and a retired military intelligence colonel) listed a whole slew of reasons why more surprises are almost inevitable, despite all the experience under our belt. Former military intelligence chief Shlomo Gazit scared us silly with a line-up of 12 strategic surprises. The future? Br-r-r.
[more]