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The new normalcy in my tribe's home turf -- that would be terrorism-threatened Israel -- is to avoid target-rich public transportation options, especially the buses, and to resign yourself to being frisked just about everywhere. One such check happened just off King George Street in West Jerusalem, at Cafe Hillel, to which a young security guard in a black windbreaker admitted me with a wave of her metal-detector wand. (The apple pie with nuts tasted good, but no need to linger.) The new normalcy is to sit and stew in a Tel Aviv traffic jam while police conduct a bomb sweep of a neighborhood, and to indulge in black-humor jokes about how maybe the early Zionists should have accepted Imperial Britain's first offer of a homeland in Uganda. Top off those experiences with an edgy visit to the occupied West Bank with an unarmed Jewish settler who steered us through a remote patch of Palestinian farmland -- and you bet I heaved a sigh of relief after clearing customs to catch an El Al flight to New York.
Was Zionism a monumental mistake -- for the Jews, that is? I wonder. One core aim of Zionism -- to restore the lost self-respect of the European ghetto Jew -- was achieved with the successful establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948 and the nation's rise as the reigning military power in one of the toughest blocks in the world -- the Arab Middle East. Nobody messes with Israel without paying a price. But the other core purpose -- to provide a sanctuary and refuge for Jewish people in the shadow of the Holocaust -- looks like a tragic and, to a certain degree, self-inflicted failure. For Israel has turned out to be one of the least safe and most stressful of all places for a Jew to be. Counting its war of independence, the country has fought three major set-piece wars with its Arab neighbors, conducted a prolonged campaign against guerrillas in Lebanon, and confronted two violent uprisings mounted by Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, the second of which, the so-called Al Aqsa intifada, continues to rage. The wars took the lives of more than 20,500 Israeli soldiers, and the current uprising has killed more than 900 Israeli civilians in suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks over the past three years. For this year's Passover holiday, when Jews celebrate their divine deliverance from bondage in ancient Egypt and subsequent passage to Palestine, the terrorism risk was sufficiently high for Israel's police commissioner to advise citizens with gun licenses to keep their weapons close at hand.
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Amid this trial, which is also sapping the Israeli economy, Jews are fleeing Israel in a growing reverse exodus. One destination, somewhat improbably, is Russia, to which an estimated 50,000 Russian Jewish emigres to Israel have returned; another, not so surprisingly, is America, which already houses an Israeli Diaspora numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, the Jewish Diaspora in the United States and elsewhere is helping to keep Israel afloat with its philanthropy: Israel annually receives some $1 billion in private donations from outside sources. The general idea of Zionism was that Israel would support the Diaspora, not the other way around.
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