Window on Israel: May you live in interesting times

Our weekend began with a reminder of Jewish history.
 
There was a small gathering at the cemetery to remember Like Roos, a distant relative of Varda. She was a good friend, curious and willing to argue, but reluctant to get too close. The others who gathered at her grave, and then for coffee afterward, may have been able to give and receive more than we due to shared experiences of a European childhood at a bad time. Two of them, like Like, found refuge with Christian families in Holland. One spoke of a friend who was passed from family to family 18 times. Another was orphaned in Poland at the age of one, did not say how she spent the war, but told of being adopted in Philadelphia. Yet another was sent by the kinder transport to Wales.
 
The police were preparing for massive demonstrations in Jerusalem and Nazareth, where Palestinians would declare Jerusalem as their cultural capital. The event could be harmless, or the organizers and the police could make it ugly. "Cultural capital" sounds like a nationalist euphemism for something grander. Events would begin at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday, with dignitaries from Tunisia and the Gulf States. Plans were to fly the Palestinian flag on the Noble Sanctuary, which Jews call the Temple Mount. There would be protests about the municipality's intention to destroy homes built illegally on public land, and the home of a bulldozer terrorist who killed Jerusalemites.
 
Not much happened, suggesting the Palestinians were either incompetent or unwilling to do more than remind the world of their existence. Crowds gathered in Bethlehem and Ramallah. There were more police than demonstrators in Jerusalem. They blocked streets and arrested 12 Palestinians who would not desist.
 
A Jewish demonstration got underway after the Sabbath, at the tent across the street from the prime minister's residence where the Schalit family marked 1,000 days of Gilad's captivity. His father called on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to do what was necessary to free Gilad during his remaining time in office. A well-known author was more forceful. He accused Olmert of indifference and ineptitude. A woman demanded Israel look after its soldiers. She threatened that the next generation of recruits would punish the country by their inaction if it did not bring all its soldiers home. The Schalits left the tent, but said they would continue the pressure from their home in the Galilee.
 
This demonstration attracted a great deal of attention from the media, but no more than two or three hundred participants.
 
The standard of comparison is the gathering of 400,000 who protested the massacres of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila in 1982. Even though it was Christian Lebanese militias that did the killing, an Israeli Committee of Inquiry concluded that Ariel Sharon was indirectly responsibility for not anticipating and preventing them, and could no longer serve as defense minister.
 
Soon after the Schalit demonstration, a car bomb exploded at a shopping mall in Haifa. It was parked outside the mall, without having had to undergo the inspection of cars that parked inside. Fortunately there were no casualties. The explosion occurred in only one of several packets the police found during three hours of disarming what remained. An Arab organization calling itself Free the Galilee claimed credit, and promised to attack again.
 
There was also news of a crisis in the Labor Party. Labor was dominant from before the establishment of the state until the election of 1977. It returned to power in the elections of 1992 and 1999, and filled senior positions in the current government. The party won 56 seats in its most successful election, in 1969. It declined to 26 seats in 1999, 19 seats in the elections of 2003 and 2006, and 13 seats in 2009.
 
Ehud Barak, who is party leader and defense minister, wants to bring Labor into the government being formed by Benyamin Netanyahu. The left wing of the party is strongly opposed to serving with Netanyahu, Israel Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman and the ultra-Orthodox. Some members are threatening to withdraw and create a Social Democratic Party if Barak wins the votes necessary to bring Labor into the government. If Barak loses the vote, he may walk away and become defense minister without party affiliation. Whatever happens seems bad for the Labor Party.
 
The Holocaust, Palestinians and quarrels about how to deal with them and ourselves are central to the Israeli experience. Sometimes they are in the background, but never far away.