Not your average city tour

Land in Toronto on Sunday, Aug. 7. After a week in Israel pick up a variety of Canadian papers. What is the first story I notice? Another silly article about Stephen Harper's wardrobe! Only in prosperous, free and open Canada do we have the luxury of spending so much time talking about one man's looks. The opportunity to travel to the Middle East came as a bit of surprise. My original summer plans did not include trying to understand the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. But when the Canada Israel Committee graciously asked me if I'd like to tour Israel with them it didn't take me but a second to say yes. Prior to my journey, and like many of my fellow travellers, my images of the Holy Land were those that came from the camera lens of Canadian and American TV networks or through some scattered readings done years ago in an undergraduate haze. I do remember one graduate lesson from a Professor Tamar Liebes which dealt with the analysis of television "disaster marathons" in the Middle East. There is nothing neutral about the word disaster and its influence on sensory perception. Growing up in St. John's with a mother who was a monarchist and a best friend whose matron was an Irish republican my youthful historical obsession was the "Irish Troubles." Israel was too far away, too confusing, not relevant to our part of the North Atlantic world where our immigrants came from Cork not Jerusalem. So curious, clouded and confused I set off to Israel. The timing of our trip added to the excitement of this personal intellectual experiment. We were going to that young nation just a couple of weeks before "disengagement" was to begin. On Aug. 15, the Disengagement Plan, a proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to remove all permanent Israeli presence in the Gaza Strip and from northern Samaria (the Northern Province of the West Bank in Israel) takes effect. The Gaza Strip contains 21 civilian Israeli settlements, and the area to be evacuated in Samaria contains four; these areas also contain numerous Israeli Defence Force (IDF) installations. Sharon says the plan is designed to improve Israel's security and international status, in the absence of political negotiations to end the conflict. The raw politics of the Disengagement Plan played out early this past week. Binyamin Netanyahu, former Israeli PM and leading contender to take the helm of the Likud party should Sharon falter, resigned from cabinet. He said the continuation of the Disengagement Plan forced his hand. He had recently served as finance minister and until now had not stepped fully offside from the coalition government. While in Israel we had occasion to meet two former advisers to Netanyahu. Each did not hide the fact that Netanyahu still harboured ambitions to return to the top. Netanyahu's surface argument about his opposition to "disengagement" is a narrative all too common to Israeli citizens. It posits that terror attacks would increase if the IDF relinquished control of territories in the zones of conflict like Gaza and the West Bank. The constant threat of an unknown attack and its repercussions have a pronounced impact on a society. Understanding the Israeli mentality, regardless of your perspective on the legitimacy of the various arguments presented by all in the Israeli-Palestinian debate, is vital to grasping the modern Middle East drama. Unfortunately for many of us the sinister London bombings have challenged our own psychological make-up and given us some sense of what it is to be stricken daily with worry about a bombing in a public square. There is a danger I appreciate in adopting the word terrorism and the perspective it creates to characterize Israel's activities in the Middle East. Palestinian advocates would argue it is a rhetorical device and the proper nomenclature for Israel would be aggressor. For now, until otherwise convinced, I believe terror and fear for survival help construct the psyche of your average Israeli citizen. It was startling, eye-opening and then miraculously part of our new normal to walk the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Tiberius and come across 18-year-old warriors, be they females or males, on or off duty, carrying machine guns. With the possible exception of the FLQ crisis, teenagers of this country have never had to do that. In the very modern Tel Aviv, the haunting image of a young female Israeli soldier, dressed in fatigues, looking no more than 14, coming out of a shopping mall, with a gun slung over her shoulder, going about her daily activities just does not seem right. That is the image of Israel that has left the strongest imprint on me. Be sure that Israel is a dynamic place despite its struggles and that of its neighbours. The people are generally well-educated, passionate, committed to democracy and seem to want peace. Three thousand years of discord and contemporary regularized attacks on its citizens by non-Israelis and Israelis (while we were there an AWOL Israeli soldier, allegedly opposed to "disengagement," killed four Israeli citizens) harden the soul. David Horowitz, the editor of the Jerusalem Post, described the Israeli people as resilient. Resilient is defined by the Oxford dictionary as readily recovering from shock or depression--springing back to its original form after being bent or stretched. Comprehending the Israeli side of the Middle East equation requires an intimate respect for, and the complexities of, this resilience. Tim Powers is vice-president of Summa Communications, a Conservative Party strategist, and is a part-time professor of communications at the University of Ottawa. tpowers@summa.ca The Hill Times

Not your average city tour

A first trip to Israel can make for quite an education, writes Ottawa insider Tim Powers, who found it startling to walk the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Tiberius along with gun-carrying civilians.

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Not your average city tour

A first trip to Israel can make for quite an education, writes Ottawa insider Tim Powers, who found it startling to walk the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Tiberius along with gun-carrying civilians.

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