[Please join me in welcoming our newest contributor, Stephanie Gutmann. Author of two must-read and important books, The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy and The Kinder, Gentler Military: How Political Correctness Affects Our Ability to Win Wars, Stephanie has recently set up shop in Israel and will be posting from time to time with her thoughts and observations.]

My first post in what I would like (with Martin's help) to be an American-in-Israel diary (yes, another one) was going to be breezy, filled with trilling about how central Israel has essentially become Southern California -- except with smart, interesting people.

I was going to tell you about the growth of a car culture, about Israel's urgent need for a good mass transit system, about the ballooning Silicone Wadi and the huge, hulking boxes of steel and glass emblazoned with names like Microsoft, HP, AmDocs, and Intel along the stretch of highway leading to Haifa that seem to have popped up overnight like mushrooms on a forest floor after a rain.

But the news that a suicide bomber detonated in the town of Dimona this morning and killed at least one and injured at least ten people has changed all that. Any suicide bombing is a nightmare but this carries special toxicity and it reminds me of how the feel of life in Israel can turn on a dime. One minute all Israel's problems are very much "out there", but in a flash they can become much more concrete:

The news outlets are starting their stories about this by saying that Israel hasn't "had a suicide attack in over a year." As with most of their news from the area this is only half right and missing essential context. There has not been a "successful" attack but there have been many, many attempts that have been thwarted. They are rattled off matter-of-factly down the left column of an inside page in the Jerusalem Post, like a Crime Blotter column in an American paper...a belt found in a car trunk here, a youth arrested at a checkpoint there.

As a result the mood in Israel has been noticeably euphoric.From the bus conductor, to the Bezeq operator, to your neighbor, Israelis have just been in such a freaking good mood. It's been like a town that just won the SuperBowl except 24/7/365.

Will this change that mood? I hope not. But I expect the mood today around town will be a little more subdued. This was in Dimona, alleged site of Israel's nuclear reactor and in the south where, a few days ago, Hamas blew open the wall separating them and the beleaguered civilians under their control from Egypt. (Yes, surprise, surprise it turns out that "the big prison", the description of choice for mawkish newspaper feature writers, has all along been controlled by Egyptian prison warders as well as Israel!)

Optimist that I am, I immediately thought of the upsides: maybe Egypt would deign to take back Gaza; maybe Egypt, now that it is more actively threatened by Hamas, would begin to take a more active role in putting Hamas down. At the very least there was a PR victory, the sight of Egyptian police forcibly pushing Gazans civilians back into their "prison" could only illustrate to the world that this is a far more complex situation than the ridiculously simple Israel-is-jailer-to-starving-Palestinian-children narrative.

Then those darn crepe-hanger pundits descended with phrases like "Hamas' aggression can only spread", "influx of weapons", "rearming,", "an Islamic terror state on Israel's southern border unchecked by an intimidated Egypt." The usual apocalyptic talk or so I thought.

But maybe not. I hate to end this post with something as lame as "time will tell", but it will, won't it?

Posted by Stephanie Gutmann at 10:29 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)
Click to share this post

Email This | DIGG This | del.icio.us | Facebook | Stumble It |
ma.gnolia | Reddit | Newsvine | Furl | Google
Spurl | Yahoo | Blink List | Connotea | Feed Me
Simpy | Linkroll | Blogmarks | Sphere | Technorati