Another good essay from Yossi Klein HaLevi:
Outside the Box, By Yossi Klein Halevi: Our apocalyptic birthright
By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI
Israelis are finally awakening from the soothingly distracting animosities of the elections and facing the possibility that we could be on the front lines of a nonconventional attack in a matter of weeks.
And so the other day I went to update, or "refresh," my gas-mask kit, as the absurdly upbeat Hebrew puts it. The distribution center is in a corner of the parking lot at Jerusalem's Malha mall: In Israel, daily life and emergency mingle.
I took a number and waited. A female soldier barely out of high school gave me a new gas mask, fitted with an air pump for men with beards, and replaced the aging atropine we're supposed to inject into our thighs in case of a nerve gas attack. On the table was an offering of dried fruits left over from the recent Tu Bishvat holiday.
I put the cardboard box in the back seat of the car, along with purchases from the mall. It didn't occur to me that I live in the only nation that provides every citizen with a gas mask.
Apocalypticism, after all, is our birthright, integral to the Israeli experience. Our population is formed from refugees from Nazism and communism, the two apocalyptic utopias of the 20th century. From its inception, our national revival has been under a fatwa from our neighbors. Among all the nations, only Israel has never been allowed to take mere existence for granted.
The single concession our enemies are expected to offer in peace talks is grudging recognition of our presence, and even then not of its legitimacy.
Not surprisingly, Israeli politics has been suffused and distorted by apocalyptic fear. Elsewhere, political parties accuse each other of threatening the well-being of the nation; here we accuse each other of threatening the nation's very existence.
Left and Right routinely treat the other's rise to power as not just a mistake, but a mortal danger. Not long ago the streets were covered with posters from the Histadrut labor federation warning that if the social gap continues to widen, the country will unravel.
EVEN THE animosity between ultra-secular and ultra-Orthodox isn't just a conventional cultural war, but is perceived by both sides as a struggle for survival.
Shinui leader Tommy Lapid warns that unless the haredim are curbed, Israel will become increasingly theocratic, alienating liberal American Jews and threatening Congressional support. At the same time, increasing numbers of educated Israelis will emigrate in despair. The combined result will be the decline of Israel into a Third World country, fatally weakening its edge over the Arab world.
For their part, the haredim perceive in secular hedonism no less a threat to Israel's survival. The Jews were exiled twice from their land, they note, because they failed to adhere to God's commands. By refusing to acknowledge that our presence here is conditional on observing the commandments, we are repeating that fatal mistake.
"Save the Shabbat so that we can remain here," warned election banners of the Ashkenazi haredi party, United Torah Judaism, explaining that without minimal respect for Shabbat observance we risk another uprooting.
Yet for all our gloomy politics, the Israeli personality - especially among young people - is remarkably free of apocalyptic brooding. Israel has succeeded in creating a generation of Jews open to the world and free of persecution complexes. That should be celebrated as a Zionist success story.
Israeli novelist David Grossman, a bitter left-wing critic of Israeli society, once said that he routinely turns down offers for sabbaticals abroad because he doesn't want to deprive his children of a year of Israeli vitality.
The essence of that vitality is the ability to extract normal life from apocalyptic threat. We've learned to live with a level of terrorism that arguably no other society has endured. We take for granted the "ordinary courage" of maintaining our daily routines, the religious young women who recite Psalms for protection on Jerusalem buses, the passersby who tackle would-be suicide bombers without waiting for the police to appear.
In our stubborn persistence, we assert the triumph of normal life over the apocalyptic. We must learn to do the same with our politics. The struggle for survival that has shaped our national life has reinforced the Jewish temptation to seek absolute ideals.
If the options we face are life and death, reason Israelis, the political responses must be appropriately uncompromising.
But that reasoning confuses politics with religion. Politics isn't about fulfilling a perfect truth but of learning to work with other parts of society to achieve an approximation of one's goals. By indulging absolutist visions we prevent the emergence of a politics of compromise.
One consequence is the mutual vetoes political parties are now imposing on each other. Shinui won't sit with Shas, Labor won't sit with Likud, Likud won't sit with the National Union. The vetoes recall the famous "three noes" of the Arab Khartoum Summit after the Six Day War: No peace, no recognition, no negotiations.
The "Khartoumization" of Israeli politics is an expression of our craving for absolute truth, a response to the life-and-death urgency of our political and cultural choices.
Yet no single cultural or political vision will prevail here. That is the lesson of the past 35 years of debate over the territories. The Right tried to impose its vision through settlement and conquest; the Left through withdrawal and negotiations. Both failed because one half of the nation tried to force its agenda on the other half.
We live, admittedly, with dilemmas - about security and morality, history and modernity - that would madden any nation. But our apocalyptic politics, which imposes mutual vetoes and posits salvation against destruction, is itself an apocalyptic threat to our most minimal coherence as a people.
The same common sense we apply in our daily lives needs to become part of our political culture. Just as we've learned to live normal lives in the midst of a terrorist war, so we need to develop a politics of basic civility that can live in the midst of apocalyptic threat, and that transforms political rivals from mortal dangers to partners in the Jewish struggle against apocalypse.
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