A Cautious Vote for Co-Existence.

August 12, 2010

I was shot by a Palestinian terrorist nine years ago on the pre-1967 side of the so-called green line marking the 1949 armistice line between Israel and Jordan, so no one has to persuade me that a terrorist attack can occur at any time or any place and that the relative quiet which has prevailed in the past few years is a fragile one that could evaporate in an instant.

It was August of 2001, one of the worst months of the Intifada. A half dozen other shooting incidents occurred on that same night and most victims didn’t fare quite as well I did escaping with relatively minor wounds. Survivors of the horrendous suicide bombing at the Sabarro restaurant were on the same floor of the hospital as I was. I also know that while the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the world are carried out by Moslems, probably 99% of Moslems would never themselves engage in a terrorist attack. I know sadly though that a large number would cheer the others on. Nonetheless while I remain very cautious, I have never really given up on the notion that perhaps some kind of co-existence can work here in this volatile part of the world. Arabs and Jews seem destined to live side by side for a long time and ultimately we ought to find a way to make that work.

The other night on my way home from an evening work-out, I stopped to get gas at the Gush Etzion intersection not far from Efrat where I have lived for 16 years. Efrat is what people refer to as a settlement, though to me, it is simply a community on land which has been Jewish owned long before Israel was established, about ten miles south of Jerusalem which is home to something on the order of ten thousand people in the midst of a block of communities with about sixty thousand people. It is an area with a long and intensive Jewish history going back to period of the Bible.

The entrance to the gas station was backed up quite a distance and on getting a bit closer I could see that the reason was a line up of cars trying to get in to the recently opened branch of a discount supermarket adjacent to the gas station. It was a Tuesday night and not usually the busiest shopping night of the week, especially not at 9:15 in the evening. Once I got a bit closer I could see that most of the cars bore Palestinian license plates and I remembered that this was the end of the first day of Ramadan, the holiest month in the Moslem calendar. A month from now, it will be Israelis shopping for the Jewish New Year.

In fact, from the moment the supermarket opened it has been something of an island of co-existence, though not without some generating some controversy. Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Moslems, and Christians from nearby Bethlehem, shop and work at the store. Interestingly the opposition to this has not focused mainly on security worries even though there was a nearly catastrophic attempt by a Palestinian to blow up a supermarket in Efrat in 2002. Security is a concern of course and it seemed to me that the security guards at the entrance took their job seriously. I certainly hope so. Most of the noise has been about the possibility that the mingling of young Jewish and Arab employees could lead to inter-marriage. If that will be the biggest worry that Israelis face in this increasingly hostile world, I think we can handle it.

It’s an experiment of course, and God forbid like any experiment it could fail. I actually hope it succeeds and becomes one more place among the paltry few were Jews and Arabs can face each other as neighbors and not as enemies.

Benjamin Dansker