Very well-put, very simple.
The opinion mirrors my own experience in Israel and with Israelis, both right and left wing, who I know as not hateful or aggressive people. I would urge anyone who really wants to know a bit about Israel and Israelis to either look for them here in Toronto or even better, go to Israel for a couple of weeks. You won't find any shortage of people willing to talk politics with you.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060821.wcomment0821/BNStory/International/home
An Israel too little known
DAVID HERLE
Special to Globe and Mail Update
There was nothing about growing up in Saskatchewan 30 years ago that prepared me for Israel. As far as I knew, there were almost no Jewish people around. Nor did I know anybody who appeared to me to hate Jews, although I could tell that there were plenty of people who kind of disliked them.
Nor did I know anybody who was Arabic, or who believed in any god other than Jesus Christ. The first thing I ever figured out about Jewish people, as I sat daydreaming in Sunday mass, was that they were pretty messed up to have killed Jesus since I'd never heard a bad thing about Him (I think the Roman Catholic Church deals with this more sensitively now).
Nor could the physical natures of Israel and Saskatchewan have been more different. Saskatchewan has more space than any place could need. The village I was born in had about 800 people. It was seven miles or so down the road from another village of the same size. A string of them spread out like that all along the highway that cut through rich and fertile farmland.
Over the course of my life, the concept of war has been both theoretical and remote. It has never once occurred to me that I might actually have to fight in a military. When Canada did engage in wars, it wasn't in Prelate or Regina, but far-off places like Europe or Korea.
I had the opportunity to spend 10 days in Israel just this spring. Israel is an amazing place. First of all, it is impossibly small: To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke, you can't swing a cat by the tail without going through customs. This has one immediate ramification — your enemies are close by. Close enough to walk.
That's why, kicking around Jerusalem my first evening in Israel, I noticed that I had seen more machine guns and soldiers in that night than in all the rest of my life. Almost all bars and restaurants "wanded" everybody who came in to check for weapons, because people regularly walk into Israel and blow themselves up in a crowded restaurant or bus. You would think just the possibility of it would incite panic, but everything seemed pretty routine. When I was there, Israel was building a fence to discourage this practice. I thought that seemed reasonable.
The second thing that struck me as remarkable about the place was how committed to it everybody I met was. It seemed as much a belief system as a country. There is a sense, inspiring to me, that they are building a dream. And they make a pretty convincing case that they have more claim to that territory than anybody else, if you take the long view over the past 3,000 years. They have taken barren desert and created lush farmland. They have built a modern competitive economy in a region without any. They have created a democracy, including freedom of religion and expression, and gender equality, in a region where such rights do not exist. They are proud of their citizens army, where every person, male or female, must do two years of military service. The people I met didn't begrudge their service. They were proud of it, because they saw Israel as a collective enterprise and everybody had a duty to protect it.
And the key concept is protection. The Israelis I met — from all walks of life — were not aggressive toward their adversaries in the region. They did not want more territory. In fact, most I met thought the settlements had been a mistake and they supported the current government's plan for unilateral withdrawal. They did not seek to impose their religion or culture on others. They did not want conflict of any kind. They wanted peace. There was much sadness that years of good-faith peace negotiations with Yasser Arafat had come to nothing.
Nobody liked the fence, but they hoped it, along with unilateral withdrawal from the settlements, might bring some peace and calm. Then Israel was attacked, without warning or provocation, its soldiers kidnapped, its towns bombed.
Fundamentally, Israel is always on the defensive. All Israelis want is to exist and be able to live. It is their opponents, including Hezbollah, who seek to deny them that basic request.
Iran is funding Hezbollah. Iran's government wants to wipe Israel from the map. It is in the face of that kind of aggression that Israel has decided to remove Hezbollah's ability to threaten it like that — at least for the time being. You can never feel safe for long there. If Hezbollah is the surrogate for Iran, and other forces and funders of terrorism, Israel is a surrogate, too.
While the rockets rain down on Israel, the target is the West — Western values, Western prosperity. To these forces, Israel stands as a lonely outpost of the West. If we don't fight terrorism there, we'll have to fight it here, because the Hezbollahs and al-Qaedas won't be satisfied with defeating Israel — they'll move on to other targets.
I hope the Israel I saw prevails.
David Herle is a partner in the Gandalf Group, a polling and communications strategy firm.
The opinion mirrors my own experience in Israel and with Israelis, both right and left wing, who I know as not hateful or aggressive people. I would urge anyone who really wants to know a bit about Israel and Israelis to either look for them here in Toronto or even better, go to Israel for a couple of weeks. You won't find any shortage of people willing to talk politics with you.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060821.wcomment0821/BNStory/International/home
An Israel too little known
DAVID HERLE
Special to Globe and Mail Update
There was nothing about growing up in Saskatchewan 30 years ago that prepared me for Israel. As far as I knew, there were almost no Jewish people around. Nor did I know anybody who appeared to me to hate Jews, although I could tell that there were plenty of people who kind of disliked them.
Nor did I know anybody who was Arabic, or who believed in any god other than Jesus Christ. The first thing I ever figured out about Jewish people, as I sat daydreaming in Sunday mass, was that they were pretty messed up to have killed Jesus since I'd never heard a bad thing about Him (I think the Roman Catholic Church deals with this more sensitively now).
Nor could the physical natures of Israel and Saskatchewan have been more different. Saskatchewan has more space than any place could need. The village I was born in had about 800 people. It was seven miles or so down the road from another village of the same size. A string of them spread out like that all along the highway that cut through rich and fertile farmland.
Over the course of my life, the concept of war has been both theoretical and remote. It has never once occurred to me that I might actually have to fight in a military. When Canada did engage in wars, it wasn't in Prelate or Regina, but far-off places like Europe or Korea.
I had the opportunity to spend 10 days in Israel just this spring. Israel is an amazing place. First of all, it is impossibly small: To paraphrase P.J. O'Rourke, you can't swing a cat by the tail without going through customs. This has one immediate ramification — your enemies are close by. Close enough to walk.
That's why, kicking around Jerusalem my first evening in Israel, I noticed that I had seen more machine guns and soldiers in that night than in all the rest of my life. Almost all bars and restaurants "wanded" everybody who came in to check for weapons, because people regularly walk into Israel and blow themselves up in a crowded restaurant or bus. You would think just the possibility of it would incite panic, but everything seemed pretty routine. When I was there, Israel was building a fence to discourage this practice. I thought that seemed reasonable.
The second thing that struck me as remarkable about the place was how committed to it everybody I met was. It seemed as much a belief system as a country. There is a sense, inspiring to me, that they are building a dream. And they make a pretty convincing case that they have more claim to that territory than anybody else, if you take the long view over the past 3,000 years. They have taken barren desert and created lush farmland. They have built a modern competitive economy in a region without any. They have created a democracy, including freedom of religion and expression, and gender equality, in a region where such rights do not exist. They are proud of their citizens army, where every person, male or female, must do two years of military service. The people I met didn't begrudge their service. They were proud of it, because they saw Israel as a collective enterprise and everybody had a duty to protect it.
And the key concept is protection. The Israelis I met — from all walks of life — were not aggressive toward their adversaries in the region. They did not want more territory. In fact, most I met thought the settlements had been a mistake and they supported the current government's plan for unilateral withdrawal. They did not seek to impose their religion or culture on others. They did not want conflict of any kind. They wanted peace. There was much sadness that years of good-faith peace negotiations with Yasser Arafat had come to nothing.
Nobody liked the fence, but they hoped it, along with unilateral withdrawal from the settlements, might bring some peace and calm. Then Israel was attacked, without warning or provocation, its soldiers kidnapped, its towns bombed.
Fundamentally, Israel is always on the defensive. All Israelis want is to exist and be able to live. It is their opponents, including Hezbollah, who seek to deny them that basic request.
Iran is funding Hezbollah. Iran's government wants to wipe Israel from the map. It is in the face of that kind of aggression that Israel has decided to remove Hezbollah's ability to threaten it like that — at least for the time being. You can never feel safe for long there. If Hezbollah is the surrogate for Iran, and other forces and funders of terrorism, Israel is a surrogate, too.
While the rockets rain down on Israel, the target is the West — Western values, Western prosperity. To these forces, Israel stands as a lonely outpost of the West. If we don't fight terrorism there, we'll have to fight it here, because the Hezbollahs and al-Qaedas won't be satisfied with defeating Israel — they'll move on to other targets.
I hope the Israel I saw prevails.
David Herle is a partner in the Gandalf Group, a polling and communications strategy firm.
