If you read only the cover of this week’s Time, you would think “Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace.” The actual cover story, though, paints a strikingly different picture. For one thing, it distinguishes between the largely secular and progressive “bubble” of Tel Aviv, “a beach city,” and the rest of Israel, particularly Jerusalem, “where more and more of life is so serious—all that stone.”

For another, as the article correctly reports, if Israelis don’t care about peace, it is because they are realistically pessimistic about the peace process—if you don’t know the causes for pessimism, you haven’t been paying attention—and because Israel’s security strategies, such as the barrier, have been mostly successful at physically shielding Israelis (at least the ones who don’t live in the West Bank) from violence. And so these people in the meantime have built lives of quiet leisure and pleasure and commerce, as anyone would. So, yes, “Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace”—in the sense that many Israelis have figured out ways to be happy in the absence of peace. But to suggest that “Israel Doesn’t Care About Peace”—in the sense that it is indifferent to peace—is, given that the place has universal conscription, and everyone is or was a soldier, and every parent’s children are or were soldiers, self-evidently ludicrous.

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