JERUSALEM
AT a dinner here with 11 adults and a bunch of children running about, there are as many differing political opinions as there are guests. It’s just like the old joke – Israel is the only country in the world with nine citizens and seven prime ministers.
But what’s especially interesting about this is that most of the people around the table are from the same family – American parents who moved to Israel decades ago, whose U.S.-born children speak fluent English with pronounced Israeli accents.
They ask me and my fiancée what we think of what we’ve seen in Israel over the past week, as Palestinian terrorism again went into overdrive with hundreds of Israelis injured in suicide attacks in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
“We want to know what you think,” I say.
“If we start arguing, we’ll never stop, so we want you to start,” one of the family’s sons says with a smile.
I say it seems to me that there’s nothing Israel can do. If the Palestinian people and the Palestinian Authority don’t want peace, there can be no peace.
Israel offered Yasser Arafat the moon and the stars at Camp David in the summer of 2000, and he not only rejected the deal but unleashed a new offensive against Israel that’s now been going on for 16 months.
“And do you think Sharon has a policy?” asks another unrelated guest, an American woman in her 60s who has lived in Israel for three decades. “They hit us, we hit them.”
She says that Israelis are just as bad as Palestinians when it comes to understanding the views and beliefs of the other side. “We don’t hear each other’s narratives,” she says.
“That’s moral equivalence,” objects another of the sons. He’s using the term popularized by Jeanne Kirkpatrick in the 1980s to talk about the way people would attempt to apologize for Communist human-rights offenses by pointing out that democracies aren’t perfect when it comes to human rights either.
The other guest says she does volunteer work on “checkpoint watch.” That is to say, she goes to the checkpoints set up by the Israeli army to monitor the actions of the soldiers and make sure they’re not harassing Palestinians who are trying to cross into Israeli territory.
“What we do is terrible, terrible,” she says.
I think of my nephew, who’s in the army. He’s 19. He’s doing something more manly and dangerous than I’ve ever done, but he’s still a boy.
All those soldiers at the checkpoints are boys, too. I’ve seen them, skinny and gangly in their green uniforms, so childlike that the machine guns hanging off their backs look like toys.
So maybe the checkpoints are terrible – though judging from what I’ve seen and read, they are as humane a checkpoint experience as there could be in the midst of a terrorist war – but the fact remains that every time you turn around in Jerusalem, a Palestinian has come in from the West Bank to try and kill hundreds of people.
Chances are those terrorists got in through a checkpoint. Which would lead you to think that maybe those checkpoints aren’t terrible enough.
I don’t say all of this at the dinner party, because I am not about to give Israelis a lecture on how hard it is to be an Israeli. All I do say is that there are times when one just has to accept that a situation is tragic. There will be no peace treaty with the Palestinians for a very long time because they just don’t want one.
What they want is the elimination of Israel and its replacement by a Palestinian state. They won’t get it. But until they see reason, there’s no bargaining with them seriously.
A young woman who’s the daughter of the family and the mother of a year-old son smiles sadly. “A lot of us are coming to feel this way now,” she says.
Unlike her brother, she’s on the leftist side of the political spectrum. “But the thought of it, another 50 years without peace, this is just too hard to bear. I just can’t bring myself to believe that.”
It’s impossible not to sympathize.
How can a nation live without hope?
But the death of a false hope is better than the perpetuation of a dangerous fantasy.
E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com