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that the answer lies in getting tougher with the Arabs, in the latter it is
that the answer lies in getting tougher with the Jews. Everywhere I went
in Jerusalem, I encountered what I suppose could be thought of as neo–
conservative views of the massacre. Judicious and self-protective, these
views are espoused, in the main, by Israel's religious and Sephardic Jews.
No one raises aJuss when Arabs kill Jews. They've never stopped killing us. Has
the PLO ever publicly apologized Jor any oj its terrorist attacks? Have any oj its
leaders taken out an ad statillg his apologies on behalf
if
his people the way Rabin
did in their papers?
In Tel Aviv, where a Peace Now rally is being planned for the up–
coming Saturday, I find the attitude of wholesale condemnation and self–
laceration which one has come to expect from those on the Israeli left -
secular Jews, academics and artists. It is an attitude meant for consumption
by the foreign press (indeed it plays better outside the country than within
it) and for anyone, Jew and non-Jew alike, made uncomfortable by the
idea that the people of the Book have made themselves familiar with the
non-Bookish enterprise of war.
Look what we've gone and done now, with
our crazy capitulation to religious Janatics who don't want to make peace with the
Arabs. How can we protest the enemy's terrorist attacks when we can't contain our
own settlers? We should go into mourning, and then we should throw the settlers
out.
But Tel Aviv also means - and it is this aspect of it, I think, which
makes it easier on the nerves than Jerusalem - forgetting the state of the
country's soul in pursuit of the state of one's inner chic. It means being
taken to Alexander's, Tel Aviv's place to eat and be seen, for dinner. I'm
told it's impossible to get into Alexander's for lunch on Friday unless
you're a regular. The restaurant may lack peppermills, but there are mag–
azine racks near the front door as well as subtly amusing touches in the
industrial-look toilets upstairs, so subtle that I have a hard time figuring
out that the pedal on the floor is how you flush. At the table behind us a
group of Manhattan-thin women and several men who look like varia–
tions on Jean-Pierre Leaud in
The 400 Blows
avidly discuss movies. Are
they in them? Do they make them? Or simply see them? Spielberg has
just been here in a blaze of publicity to open
Schindler's List.
In one of the
many interviews he's given to the Israeli press, the director ruefully con–
ceded that "Jerusalem of Gold," which closed the American version of
the film, struck a wrong note with Israeli audiences (for whom the song is
a tired anthem) and has been changed to the more fittingly elegiac "Eli,
Eli." Although Spielberg himself in all his newly Jewish celebrity has been
embraced by the country, his movie was given a distinctly less enthusiastic
response.
