Tel Aviv may be more liberally minded than many Israeli cities, but even here, skepticism over a possible peace settlement with the Arab countries ran strong this week.
While many people interviewed seemed to be willing to give up large parts of the West Bank, they nonetheless were not prepared to consider the possibility of returning parts of Jerusalem or the Golan Heights.
“I think peace with the Arabs is a wonderful idea, and it would help Israel, but it is hard to imagine that it will really happen,” Dana, a 34-year-old mother of two, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday.
Dana vividly remembers the Six-Day War of 1967, when, as a 10-year child, she hid under the kitchen table as the thunder of artillery roared in the distance.
But like many young adults in Tel Aviv who can remember filling sandbags during that war, she no longer feels the West Bank serves as a buffer zone between Israel and an enemy attack.
“I don’t have any special feelings about the West Bank, and certainly not about the Gaza Strip. But I have friends across the Green Line, and I know that they are worried,” Dana said.
“My own sister, Ruti, lives in Kochav Yair, and half of that township is across the line. What are they going to do? Put up barbed wires in the middle?”
In general, residents of Tel Aviv seem to be more relaxed about the possibility of a Palestinian state than their counterparts in Jerusalem, where many men can be seen walking the streets with revolvers tucked into their belts.
“But still, one wonders what will happen,” Michael Levy said as he and his wife, Ilana, shopped in a local grocery store here.
The couple, in their late 60s, have lived all their lives in Tel Aviv and define themselves as old-time “Mapainiks, before everything went wrong with the party.” Mapai was forerunner of today’s Labor Party.
They have opposed Israel’s administration of the West Bank and Gaza Strip “for years, from the moment we realized it doesn’t do anything good for the security of the country.”
But they agree that Jerusalem and the Golan Heights “pose a different problem altogether.”
They insist that has nothing to do with the fact that their son Ilan lives on a religious moshav in the Golan. “The Golan is a part of Israel, and a very necessary part, too,” said Michael Levy.
NO TRUST OF THE SYRIANS
The couple recalled that before the 1967 war, they hesitated to visit friends at kibbutzim in the Galilee that were exposed to Syrian gunfire from the Golan Heights.
As far as Michael Levy is concerned, it is unrealistic to expect Israelis to trust the Syrians. “They are different from other Arabs, more cruel, more strongly anti-Israel than other countries,” he said.
“In general though,” Ilana Levy said, “we believe in the notion of land for peace. There remains, of course, the problem of Jerusalem, and all the new neighborhoods built on land taken in 1967.
“But that is already a part of Israel,” she said. “Ramat Eshkol is not Nablus, and East Talpiyot is not Hebron. We will always be opposed to a divided Jerusalem. But who, apart from some chauvinists, really cares about the rest of the territories?” she asked.
Another Monday shopper, Yona Greenberg, had a different outlook on the problem of the territories.
“It might sound naive and simple-minded,” she said, but “if Israel had to give up the West Bank, the government would have to start building within Israel,” and that would help her personally.
For Greenberg, a secretary at a computer software company north of Tel Aviv, her “biggest problem for the last 10 years is not whether or not I can go on a tour of Hebron or Ramallah, but whether I will have somewhere to live next year.”
She has no friends or relatives in the West Bank, and only when friends of hers go on army duty in the territories does she hear “what really goes on out there.”
“One thing is for sure,” she said. “Things have to change. We cannot allow them to continue like this forever.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
