Skipping the Party

I'm not sorry I wasn't invited to Olmert's and Peres' party. I'm just sorry we can't do better.

An overcast, lugubrious day in Jerusalem. My business took me to the Knesset. The center of town is nearly abandoned. Jerusalemites know what to expect when the President of the United States comes to visit and the police bar them from entering their own downtown. Almost everyone stayed away. The city looks eerily like a museum piece or a movie set, the stage for somebody else’s illusions with ourselves as minor walk-on characters. Somewhere over our heads, about at the elevation of the police helicopter circling endlessly above, someone is staging a tawdry piece of theater. Ostensibly it’s about us, we’re certainly paying for it (in more ways than one), but it’s not actually meant for the real people down here on the ground.

The sense of detachment intensified as I passed security and entered the Knesset. The Knesset is festooned with flags—American and Israeli flags on alternate flagpoles. Once upon a time this sight, in this place, would have given me a thrill. Now I am aware mainly of a hole in the heart where the thrill would have been. I haven’t been able to summon a thrill at the sight of an Israeli flag since February 2005, when the Disengagement Law passed the Knesset. I am reminded of stories people told me back in the Old Country, people who couldn’t find it within themselves to be proud of the American flag as long as the Vietnam war was going on (From the time I could form a professional judgment I felt differently. To keep the Viet Cong away from South Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge away from the Cambodians was a cause worth fighting for, botched beyond retrieval by “experts” who had no comprehension of their job, the price paid by hapless and innocent millions).

George Bush is coming to visit a country with a fool (“history is meaningless!”) for president, a crook for prime minister, and a governing elite on the skids, unworthy guardians of the Jewish people and its inheritence. They have thrown themselves a party at public expense and invited the President of the United States to dress it up. The gaiety is forced—they have precious little to be gay about—but they’ll go through the motions all the same. My fellow citizens and I are invited to gawk, coo and be impressed. Considering the stars of the show, it’s not hard to decide to skip it.

It wouldn’t hurt so much if it these people hadn’t been chosen for their jobs by the people. They reflect on us, and to some extent the reflection is justified. They claim to represent the State of Israel but, detached from Jewish history and tradition and from common decency, they are capable of representing, of celebrating, nothing but themselves. Ordinary people know this and feel detached from their celebration. Because these are the people we chose to represent us, and because they do represent us, we find ourselves at a loss, unsure of what or whether to celebrate.

It shouldn’t be this way. The President of the United States ought to come to Jerusalem, the seat of David’s throne and the capital of the Jewish state, as a pilgrim and not as a celebrity. If his hosts knew what and whom they ought to represent, even the pilgrimage of the greatest potentate in the world would not seem like so much, but only homage—spiritual, not political—where homage is due.

What is one to do about it? Work. “The truly righteous,” wrote Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak HaCohen Kook, “do not complain about the darkness but spread the light.” What did I do today in the Knesset? I worked on legislation to eliminate the Israeli equivalent of the Riot Act, under which most of the protesters against disengagement were arrested, and the law against “insulting a civil servant,” used by the State Prosecutor to criminalize speech and writing on public affairs. I think I contributed at least as much to a future Jewish state that one can be proud of as Olmert and Peres did in their day’s work.