EDITH KURZWEIL
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points would be no more than twelve miles, where enemies even more eas–
ily than now could invade one's backyard. So, while most of the Israelis I met
don't want Israel to "rule" the Palestinians, and would be willing to give "land
for peace," they would not do so without the necessary guarantees of secu–
rity. Their debates revolve around how to reach this goal, what constitutes
security, and who is to guarantee it. Their newspapers dwell on, and con–
demn, every infringement of human rights-by both Arabs and Israelis. I
must confess, however, that I understood their fears better after a professor
was killed while walking to work a few days after our arrival-in a grove
about half a mile from where we were staying. (When reading about the
terrorist attack on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem bus, after my return, I realized
that it could have been "my" bus, since I used it eight times.)
Such incidents always reopen the debate on whether peace and secu–
rity are compatible, on whether security may be possible without the mili–
tary-in a country which since its creation has been surrounded by enemies
and inevitably has gotten used to relying on military solutions. "Arabs and
Palestinians must convince us that they no longer challenge the very exis–
tence of the state of Israel," say some; "What must they do to convince us?"
ask others. Yet, political convictions clash with military solutions of the
In–
tifada;
issues of personal safety are confused with those of national security;
and, paradoxically, the Israeli military is asking for political solutions while a
majority of the population would want the army to be tougher. Indeed, it was
found that Israeli public opinion polls do not support the social psychologists'
construct of the military mind; and that Israeli soldiers are low on scales of
dogmatism and authoritarianism, though high on nationalism. Could it be that
a citizens' army cannot be measured on the scales of a professional one?
These issues came up also at the first seminar sponsored by the James
Shasha International Institute, whose founder, an Argentinian businessman,
believes that through first-hand , human contact alone, international under–
standing may evolve. Given the title of the seminar, "The People of the
Book in the Global Village: Media and Messages Through Time and Space,"
the organizers took the participants (they came from around the globe) back
to the days of King Solomon and King David-by means of rare books, and
by a trip to the excavations at Megiddo, some of which yielded 4,500 year–
old treasures. And we were guests at Kibbutz Hazorea, which was started
by a handful of young German Jews who fled the Nazis in the 1930s. To
ensure democratic participation by over a thousand members, they recently
have installed cable television in every living room.
Not only the founding kibbutznik who took us around, but also
all
the
other experts, explained current issues in terms of their historical as well as
their problematic contexts. Thus we heard, for instance, how Israelis of
