The incident didn’t come out of nowhere. On Aug. 18, eight Israelis were killed on a highway near Eilat by Gazan and Egyptian terrorists who had infiltrated southern Israel by way of the Sinai—Egyptian territory. Israeli forces pursued the terrorists back into Egypt and mistakenly killed five Egyptian soldiers and police officers. The next day, the Egyptian Cabinet called an emergency meeting, where it considered recalling Egypt’s ambassador from Tel Aviv if the Israelis wouldn’t apologize or agree to a joint probe of the officers’ killings. Activists and political parties demanded the expulsion of Israel’s ambassador in Cairo. Several major activist groups, including the left-leaning April 6 Movement, organized a large protest in front of the Israeli Embassy. It culminated with a 23-year-old carpenter scaling the 13-story building to replace the Israeli flag with an Egyptian one.

Israeli and pro-Israel skeptics of the Egyptian revolution have predicted since the Mubarak government fell that Egypt’s pathologically anti-Israel population could push the country toward a violent confrontation with its northern neighbor. These past weeks have made it painfully clear that at least some of the Egyptian people—at best—refuse to tolerate any Israeli presence in their country.

But the real question is how much popular sentiment against the Jewish state actually matters. On a recent reporting trip I took to Cairo, I found that despite the view from the street, the country’s military and its key political factions have no interest in upending the status quo. The cold peace is colder than ever. But even in the wake of Friday’s violence, it’s proving durable.

***

Ever since Anwar El Sadat signed the Camp David Accords in 1978, the Egyptian government has combated any sense of national inferiority by propagating an amazingly resilient myth: Egypt won the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the Camp David Treaty represented Israel’s capitulation to a morally and militarily superior enemy. It’s a myth that helped Egypt recuperate some of its national self-esteem in light of its recognition of the Jewish State and subsequent expulsion from the Arab League. Murals of the Egyptian Army crossing the Suez Canal dot the road between the airport and downtown Cairo, and a downtown bridge and a major suburb of Cairo are named after Oct. 6, 1973, the date of Egypt’s assault on Israeli positions in the Sinai. Whenever I asked Egyptians about their country’s attitude toward the 1973 war, the answer came immediately: It was a major victory.

All of this made Egyptians feel better, but the myth also helped bolster the power of Hosni Mubarak, who took over as president after Sadat’s 1981 assassination. The North Korean-built October War Panorama, a multimedia depiction of Egypt’s attack on the Suez Canal located in the Heliopolis district of Cairo, includes a mosaic that places Mubarak in the center of a group of military commanders planning the war’s opening offensive. Similar imagery is on display at the Cairo Citadel’s National Military Museum.

While Mubarak incited hostility toward the Jewish State at home, he successfully convinced Israel and the United States that he could uphold Western interests in the region. Ezzedine Fishere, a former Foreign Ministry official at the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv and the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council for Culture, likened Mubarak’s political strategy to riding two horses simultaneously. “You can ride the two horses so long as you’re going straight,” Fishere explained to me. “This is why stability was so important to Mubarak. When there’s instability, the two horses go in opposite directions. Because the public wants you to live up to your commitments, you’ve been feeding this inflammatory discourse about Israel being the source of all evil. … On the other hand, the Israelis are basically your security partners in the region.”

Future Egyptian leaders can’t afford to play this kind of double game, Fishere argues. “The challenge is for the state to face the public and say, ‘We’ve been having very good relations with Israel for 30 years,’ ” he said. “And at the same time, we’ll have to be frank with the Israelis and the Americans and say ‘We can’t be your accomplice.’ ” The Mubarak regime’s system for dealing with Israel won’t work anymore. The question, then, is whether a more aggressive, and possibly outright hostile, dynamic will take its place.

“The majority of people would agree that we shouldn’t get into to a military conflict with Israel,” Gamal Soltan, director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, told me in his Cairo office in July. “But this doesn’t mean that they will refrain from doing things that would make this more likely.” He believes that a future, representative Egyptian government—parliamentary elections are currently scheduled for October—will have no choice but to respond to the public’s overwhelmingly anti-Israel attitude, which could result in less security cooperation between the two countries.

Soltan added that the new Egyptian government will also have to contend with the long-standing popular sense that the country should reorient its foreign policy. He says that much of the Egyptian street looks to Iran’s open defiance of the West with a certain degree of envy. “We felt inferior vis-a-vis Iran because they did the things we weren’t able to, like supporting the Palestinians, criticizing both Egypt and the United States, and allying with some of the champions of Arab rights, like Hezbollah,” said Soltan. “After the revolution, things might change.”

Like Soltan, Fishere believes that most Egyptians do not want to fight another war with Israel. But he’s more hopeful that democracy will ultimately lead to a less-radicalized discourse on the Jewish State. “We have to make [Egyptian policy toward Israel] more truthful and ultimately more responsible,” Fishere said. “It will be more in the direction of Turkey than in the direction of Iran.” So, Egypt’s strategic posture toward Israel will likely change. That doesn’t mean the peace treaty is going anywhere.

***

Luckily, the most powerful player in Egypt—the military—already understands this.

And the army, which Egyptian intellectual Tarek Heggy called the “the only power in the country,” enjoys deep popular support. According to last month’s Pew poll  of Egyptian political attitudes, 53 percent of Egyptians have a “very good” view of the military, compared to the 29 percent religious leaders enjoy. Field Marshal Mohammad Tantawi, the head of the Military Council, has a 45 percent favorability rating—higher than that of the April 6 Movement (38 percent) and the Muslim Brotherhood (37 percent).

At a major protest in Tahrir Square on July 8, I heard protesters reprising the revolutionary chant that “the army and the people are one hand.” Across Cairo, both Egyptian flags and displays of support for the military (such as fatigue-pattern street art) were ubiquitous. Egyptians still believe that the army is on their side: On Aug. 1, when the military dispersed a three-week tent protest that had shut down Tahrir Square, passersby cheered them on. A Sept. 9 protest against military rule in Tahrir Square was underwhelming. (Shadi Hamid, the director of research at the Brookings Institute’s Doha branch, called it “the most incoherent, ineffective, anti-strategic protest in recent memory.”)

The military has every reason to preserve Egypt’s treaty with Israel. According to an official familiar with the U.S. government’s operations in Egypt, there are currently “tens of thousands” of American military contractors in Egypt, which still receives over $1.3 billion in annual military aid from the United States. Experts I spoke to in Egypt estimated that the military controls between 20 and 40 percent of the country’s economy. War with Israel serves no obvious strategic purpose for Egypt, and it would probably end American financial assistance, threaten the army’s business holdings, and lead to massive casualties. (Nearly 20,000 Egyptian soldiers were killed in the 1967 and 1973 wars.) Plus, the sectarianism that makes Lebanon and Syria so threatening to Israel is absent in Egypt. There are no religious or ethnic militias that could plausibly challenge the military’s monopoly on force.

Tellingly, even the more extreme elements in Egyptian politics have sought accommodation with the military, rather than pressuring it into a more confrontational stance. Abdul-Jalil al-Sharnouby, the former editor of the Muslim Brotherhood’s website, told me that he quit the organization partly over its willingness to cooperate with “the Brotherhood’s enemies,” including the ruling military junta.

**

In the hours after Friday’s embassy incident, Egypt’s ruling military council reiterated its commitment to the 1978 Camp David Accords. Egyptian Information Minister Osama Heikal quickly spoke out against the riot, calling it “a gross violation of the law,” adding that “one cannot call the perpetrators … either brave or patriotic.” And Egypt yesterday reinstated some of the emergency measures lifted after Mubarak’s ouster in February, including laws that limit protesters’ ability to gather in public. A spokesperson for the Egyptian Cabinet told Reuters that “returning to normalcy is the objective for both sides” after the Israeli Embassy conflagration.

No doubt this measure will enrage some elements of the protest movement. But this only shows how badly Egypt’s current military rulers want to stabilize the country’s affairs, including its now-strained relationship with Israel. As soon as the military realized that there was a real possibility of foreign diplomats being seriously hurt or even killed on Egyptian soil, they “realized that the external price they would pay [for inaction] is higher than the internal one for stopping the protest,” Sam Tadros, an Egypt expert at the Hudson Institute told me yesterday. David Schenker of the Washington Instutite for Near East Policy agrees that in the aftermath of Friday’s incident, the military’s top priority is bringing some stability back to the country’s internal and foreign affairs. “What happened with the embassy demonstrates not only that the [ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces] is the leading supporter of the peace treaty, but I’d say it’s indicative of the ongoing situation in the country,” he says. “They feel that there has to be a red line. There has to be some semblance of order.”

Egyptian attitudes toward Israel aren’t going to improve. And Egyptian voters, through popular protest and, eventually, through the ballot box, are capable of reversing the kind of close official cooperation that Mubarak pursued. But for the time being, at least, it’s the military that matters. And in the months since the revolution, its calculations toward the Jewish state haven’t changed.

On the eve of Tisha B’Av, the day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the first and second Temples and other catastrophic events in Jewish history, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke to Neria about his own wartime experiences and what his research has taught him about treating trauma. Neria was awarded a Medal of Valor for his service, and in 1986 he published the novel Esh, Hebrew for “fire,” a fictionalized account of his time in combat. He and Ivry discussed the psychological benefits and risks of revisiting traumatic events year after year, as Jews do with the ritual reading of the Book of Lamentations. [Running time: 20:00.]

Since the abduction, the Shalit family has received a couple of letters from their son, an audio tape, and finally a short video, delivered in October 2009 in exchange for the release of 20 female Palestinian prisoners. Hamas has refused Israeli demands to allow the International Red Cross to visit Shalit, although Israel allows such visits at its prisons. Not much more is known about the Israeli hostage’s situation. Shalit, now 24 years old, seemed in the 2009 video to have recovered from the physical wounds he suffered during the abduction. The fear now is mainly about Shalit’s psychological well-being: What have nearly five years in total seclusion done to his emotional health? Will he return from Gaza a shadow of his former self? In the video Shalit was quite coherent, but 19 months have passed since the taping, and Shalit had read from a script dictated by his captors. Shalit’s parents are usually reluctant to express personal feelings, but from interview to interview their worry about his mental state only seems to grow.

Hamas activists have told Nathan Thrall, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, that members of the group mentioned “Gilad” many times during phone conversations after the abduction, to mislead Israeli intelligence. “We took Gilad to lunch,” the activists would say, or “We met with him.” But it is believed that the people who are actually responsible for the soldier avoid using phones. Most of their contact with the outside world is done through messengers, young boys who deliver handwritten notes.

Has Israel made any attempts to rescue Shalit since his capture? As far as we know, not anything Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been proud of. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak constantly say that all options remain open and that the Israeli security branches are working on relevant operational plans. Current and former senior officials in Israel’s different security agencies have attributed the failure to rescue Shalit to the strict secrecy surrounding his whereabouts. A tight, disciplined group of members from the organization’s military wing is in charge of hiding the kidnapped soldier and guarding him. The senior members of the military wing, many of them veterans of the Israeli prison system, have learned their lessons from the failures of previous kidnapping attempts. The IDF’s previous chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, admitted in 2009: “We don’t know where Gilad is held.”

One might assume that Shabak, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, has some general information about the area in which Shalit is being held, but for an Israeli prime minister to seriously consider the possibility of a rescue operation along the lines of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, the information has to be precise. Netanyahu also has to ask himself what kind of risk he’d be willing to take regarding the lives of the commandos. If, for example, Shalit is held in a secure basement of a house located in a heavily populated refugee camp, the raid wouldn’t only be a question of the intelligence required—What house? What floor? Is the hostage forced to carry a belt of explosives on his body?—but also how to surprise his guards, send in a team unannounced, and get both the rescue commandos and the hostage out safely without having the whole of the Gaza Strip on their tails?

Senior Israeli officers with experience of missions of this sort admit that imagining a Shalit rescue is the most challenging tactical problem they have ever encountered. Netanyahu, contrary to his right-wing ideological background and tough public persona regarding terrorism, has actually been very careful about using military force in the past, because he knows that operations can go terribly wrong. He lost his older brother, Col. Yoni Netanyahu, in Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, during the most famous and heroic Israeli rescue operation. In 1994, Shabak located another kidnapped soldier, Nahson Waxman, who was held in a Palestinian village near Jerusalem. Both Waxman and an IDF officer were killed during the rescue attempt.

But Israel has also failed to successfully apply non-military pressure on Hamas. After Shalit’s abduction, Israel arrested about 40 Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament and a few ministers in the West Bank, who were then released—moves that seemed largely inconsequential on the Palestinian side. In late February this year, a Palestinian engineer and presumed Hamas member, Dirar Abu-Sisi, disappeared while riding a night train in Ukraine. A few weeks later, Israel admitted to having him in their custody but refused to discuss how he got there. The German weekly Der Spiegel, considered to have great intelligence sources, claimed Abu-Sisi was kidnapped by Mossad agents looking to discover where Shalit is being held. Abu-Sisi denies any knowledge of Shalit’s whereabouts. And last month, the Israeli Air Force assassinated Tayser Abu-Snima, a member of the Popular Resistance Committees who is considered to have been involved in the planning of the Shalit abduction.

When Shalit was kidnapped, Ehud Olmert was serving as prime minister. In March 2009, as Olmert was being forced out of office after he was indicted for corruption, many Israeli analysts assumed that Olmert would try to finish the Shalit deal before handing over the government to Netanyahu. An Israeli delegation, including Shin Bet head Yuval Diskin and Olmert’s chief negotiator on the swap, Ofer Dekel, traveled to Cairo for indirect negotiations with Hamas. The Israelis stayed in one hotel, while the leader of the Hamas military wing, Ahmad Al-Jaabri, whom Israel had tried to assassinate numerous times, stayed in another. Olmert’s people now claim that the Egyptians came close to striking a deal. But then, they say, Hamas officials watched a TV broadcast showing then and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak sitting with the Shalit family. Barak went there to express support for the parents’ demand that the government make more concessions and close the deal. Hamas, says Olmert, immediately realized that it now had power to squeeze Israel into new concessions and refused to sign the agreement. Barak, naturally, denies the story.

Al-Jaabri and the senior members of Hamas’ military wing seem to be calling the shots regarding a possible Shalit deal. During the Cairo talks, Hamas was represented by three members of the military wing and only one member of the political wing, Mahmud a-Zahar. Even the head of Hamas’ political office in Damascus, Khaled Mashaal, usually considered the organization’s leader, can only advise Al-Jaabri on the subject. While the Hamas government in Gaza has asked Al-Jaabri many times to reach an agreement with the Israelis, he has refused, insisting that Israel should accept all his demands. A year ago, a crisis developed in the Hamas leadership over Shalit, and a-Zahar resigned from the negotiation team. Six months later, he rejoined. It is not known how the prospective Hamas-Fatah pact is likely to affect the splits within the Hamas leadership or the possibilities for a deal.

During the last four years and 11 months, Hamas has been trying to create public pressure on the Israeli government to agree to Hamas’ terms for completing the deal. It started with the publication of one of Gilad Shalit’s letters to his family after less than a year in captivity. But Hamas’ attempts to ratchet up the pressure on Israel have grown more complex with time and have recently been aimed at creating a feeling of urgency or panic in Israeli public opinion. For example, a demonstration organized by Hamas in Gaza included a performance in which a Palestinian actor playing Gilad Shalit appeared in a cage, crying for his release. In April 2010, the armed wing of Hamas released an animated video portraying Shalit’s father, Noam, walking empty streets, carrying a picture of his son. He passes by billboards with Olmert promising in Hebrew to release Gilad. Then Noam passes a picture of Netanyahu, who promises the same. In the background, you can hear the real voice of the abducted soldier. The Noam character continues to walk, growing old with a walking stick until the announcement comes that a deal has been completed. The father is then shown waiting for Gilad at the entrance to the Gaza Strip. A Red Cross bus arrives carrying a coffin covered with the Israeli flag. Noam cries out and wakes up from a nightmare. The subtitle reads: “There is still hope.”

***

What is known is that Hamas is currently demanding that Israel release 1,000 prisoners for Shalit, in two stages. At first, 550 prisoners chosen by Israel would be freed in return for Shalit being delivered to a third party, presumably Egypt. Then, Israel would release 450 more prisoners, from a list of names that Hamas has provided. Israel has also discussed another release of 400 prisoners as a gesture to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. Both sides have agreed on the mechanism by which the prisoners would be released. The heart of the problem remains the group of 450 prisoners Israel says has blood on its hands. Many of these prisoners are serving life sentences for their involvement in the murder of hundreds of Israelis during the Oslo peace process and the Second Intifada. Hamas expects the release of some of its senior prisoners and also of Marwan Bargouti, one of Fatah’s leaders in the West Bank, and Ahmad Saadat, the leader of the Palestinian Popular Front. According to reports printed in the Arab press, the debate now concerns a few dozen prisoners. Israel insists that some of these men remain in jail. Others, it suggests, will not be allowed to return to their homes in the West Bank but will be kept further away, in Gaza or in Europe, since they might help Hamas rebuild its terror networks if they were permitted to stay in the West Bank. Netanyahu has said lately that most of the discussion now regards the number of prisoners to be deported.

A senior Egyptian official who participated in the negotiations says that Israel has handled the issue “worse than a used cars salesman.” The Israelis, he insists, “behaved like amateurs. They drew an imaginary red line and then agreed to withdraw, again and again. And all this time Hamas didn’t blink. They never moved an inch.” In the beginning, Olmert agreed to free only a few dozen prisoners from the Hamas list. By the end of his term, it was 325 of the 450—and it is believed that Netanyahu has agreed to go even further.

After Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in early 2009, Germany replaced Egypt as the primary mediator between Israel and Hamas. The chief German representative, Gerhard Conrad, has acquired a great deal of experience in previous prisoner deals with Hezbollah. This time, it seems his mission is even more difficult. In early April, Hamas officials reported that Conrad’s latest visit to the region had failed. A few days later, Netanyahu’s negotiator, Hagai Hadas, announced his resignation, saying he had promised his family that he would retire after two years. Netanyahu quickly replaced him with another Mossad official, David Meidan, the former head of the organization’s international relations branch, which means that the Shalits will now have to deal with its third official representative in less than five years.

***

Meanwhile, Gilad Shalit himself has become a sort of national hero, our collective Israeli child. His is the young face that an entire nation reflects upon in a mixture of guilt, mercy, and sympathy. While the United States generally refuses to negotiate with the kidnappers of American citizens or soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan (Olmert says that President George W. Bush was angry at him for “talking to terrorists” regarding Shalit), here everything is open to bargaining.

The difference between the American and Israeli approaches to hostage situations might have a lot to do with the fact that Israel has a mandatory military service, while in the United States, an American soldier’s kidnapping might almost be considered a freely chosen occupational hazard. In a small society like Israel, where every young man is expected to serve, the general sense of solidarity with Shalit is huge, particularly among the young. Israeli sensitivity toward military casualties has grown rapidly over the last two decades—and is even greater when it comes to live hostages.

The Shalit family’s tragedy has become a national story whose continuing resonance throughout most sectors of Israeli society is hard to overstate. Gilad Shalit’s face can be seen on more Israeli T-shirts than Che Guevara, Jim Morrison, and Bart Simpson put together. Google will turn out 2.2 million results for his name in Hebrew alone, while the names of the officer and soldier killed in his tank are nearly forgotten. Two months ago, Israeli police arrested a con man suspected of stealing hundreds of thousands of shekels from citizens who believed they were contributing money to the Shalit cause.

Gilad’s parents, Noam and Aviva, have stayed for months at a protest tent across the road from Netanyahu’s official residence. On cold Jerusalem nights, one can see them there, two lonely figures, fighting the freezing wind. The Shalits are considered a very polite, patriotic family, though in an interview with us two and a half years ago, Noam Shalit attacked Olmert quite aggressively. Had Olmert and his sons served in combat units themselves, he implied, the prime minister’s attitude might have been different. For Noam Shalit, whose twin brother Yoel died as a tank commander in the Yom Kippur war of 1973, this is a very thorny issue. His relationship with Netanyahu (a former officer of the elite special forces unit Sayeret Matkal) is slightly better.

New initiatives on Shalit’s behalf are born every week. One Tuesday morning this March, a group of citizens called upon all Israelis to stop what they were doing for five minutes and think of Shalit. Hundreds of thousands of people participated, including President Shimon Peres and many government ministers. It was an act of frustration, of impotence, wrote Michal Levertov in Haaretz. Like another new Israeli custom—leaving an empty chair for Gilad during the Seder—the protest moves the problem into the mystical world, exempting the government from responsibility for Shalit’s fate. Levertov called such acts “a memorial for a living soldier.” She is right.

The organization campaigning for Shalit’s release, a movement that depends strictly on volunteers, has debated one question for years: Should the fight become more aggressive? The debate inevitably brings up the Groff affair, during which eight IDF soldiers were kidnapped in 1983 by Palestinians in Lebanon. Miriam Groff, one of the soldiers’ mothers, applied personal pressure on then-Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin and even collapsed in his office. Rabin couldn’t stand it and approved the Jibril prisoners swap, agreeing to release hundreds of terrorists. Two years later, many of those prisoners helped ignite the First Intifada.

***

Growing public support for Shalit’s release “at any cost” drives the old guard in Israel—former generals and the conservative right—crazy. Many see the attitude toward Shalit as sentimental and childish. They are also afraid that his release will bring a huge surge in morale for Hamas, not to mention the danger from hundreds of experienced terrorists coming back to the territories after gaining a lot of knowledge from their colleagues in Israeli jails. “Shabak officials showed me the list of prisoners who are supposed to return to my area,” says one IDF regional commander in the West Bank. “I’m very worried. This would completely change the situation here.”

Retired Maj. Gen. El’azar Stern is one of the proposed deal’s toughest and most vocal opponents. “Shalit should not be released at any cost,” he told us. “Hamas’ demands are irrational and not proportional. We should not think only of the Shalits but also of the parents of children who might be killed if these murderers are released.” Much of the public hysteria is produced by a PR firm working with the Shalit family and movement, Stern said, pointing at the ceiling. The PR firm’s offices are located a few floors above Stern’s office, at the Azriely complex in midtown Tel Aviv. Like others who oppose a swap, Stern reminded us that in 2004 Israel released hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in return for the bodies of three IDF soldiers and one (living) corrupt reserve officer held in Lebanon. The result? According to Shabak, 165 Israelis were killed by some of these former prisoners over the following three years.

Netanyahu is not impervious to such arguments. Recently, while speaking to Knesset members from the right wing of his Likud party, he complained about their attacks against him. “I’m doing everything I can to keep the prisoners in jail,” Netanyahu reprimanded one MK. “They’re all supposed to be released for Shalit. It’s just me, only me, alone, preventing this, under enormous pressure. I agreed to free more prisoners than Olmert did, but I refuse to let them come back to Judaea and Samaria. Let them go to Tunisia.”

On the other hand, here’s what Nahum Barnea, a senior Israeli journalist, wrote in Yedioth Ahronot the day the entire country stopped for five minutes in honor of Shalit. Maybe there’s no other way but paying the full price Hamas demands, he wrote. The government has tried everything and failed. After almost five years it’s time to move on. Barnea’s main argument refers to the damage the Shalit affair has caused to the heart of the state’s commitment to its citizens, and especially its combat soldiers. While service in the IDF is mandatory, combat service is no longer unavoidable, and an 18-year-old Israeli can easily find ways to serve in comfortable places and avoid danger. IDF senior officers have told us, on numerous occasions, that Shalit’s fate is a source of constant frustration among their troops. The fear young soldiers show for their lives gradually erodes the unwritten agreement between them and their government.

Although public opinion polls show a steady majority of support for “great concessions” in return for Shalit’s release, some analysts believe that publishing the names of the senior prisoners to be included in the swap (and their deeds) might change the public’s attitude. Being familiar with the details of the case, and the men who are likely to be released in any prisoner swap, we have differing views on the wisdom of a deal. In fact, having worked and written together for many years, we have yet to encounter a question in which our own personal opinions are so divided. It may be, as the saying has it, that you stand where you sit. One of us (Issacharoff) tends to emphasize the huge advantages Hamas will gain from a deal, the danger to the PA regime in the West Bank, and the possible future terrorist attacks. The other (Harel) concentrates on the ongoing damage to the IDF’s spirit. It is also an emotional issue: When your 7-year-old son’s favorite bedtime imaginary game becomes “saving Gilad Shalit,” it is hard not to want to see Shalit free, whatever the cost.

Amos Harel is the defense analyst for Haaretz. Avi Issacharoff is the newspaper’s Arab affairs correspondent. They blog at MESS Report, on Haaretz.com.

Things have been trending badly for Israel for some time now, but Hosni Mubarak losing control of Egypt makes the Jewish state untenable. That’s right: Israel is no longer feasible. I don’t mean that in the manner the international left usually does—that nationalism is passé and we must move on to higher forms of communal existence. I mean it in the old-fashioned way of nations and peoples who are vanquished when the balance of power tips against them. And I mean it strategically—a tiny country with a Jewish majority of 6 million can’t survive surrounded by enemies and forsaken by its superpower ally.

For several decades American policymakers from both sides of the aisle traveled to the Middle East to explain how much peace there meant to Washington. During the October 1973 war, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon’s airlifts showed the Arabs that it was futile to make war on Israel while they were backed by an awesome superpower. The Arabs could not hope to beat Israel in war so they would have to petition the Israelis’ U.S. patron if they wanted any concessions. Besides, there were great rewards, such as American military aid, to be had for anyone who would sign a deal—which essentially amounted to a bribe.

Coming to power in Egypt after Anwar Sadat, who was assassinated for signing a treaty with Israel, Mubarak kept the peace and thereby underwrote the integrity of the peace process. Egypt was the trophy that Washington kept on display to show all the other Arab states what they, too, might have should they come to their senses and just sign a deal. But as it turns out, the peace treaty must not have been that important because the man who preserved it for some 30 years in the face of domestic as well as regional opposition—enduring several attempts on his life—was tossed aside by the Obama Administration. In doing so, the United States showed that everything it had ever said about the peace process was total nonsense.

America’s Arab allies were astonished that the White House would treat a close ally like Mubarak as it did; but they were also dumbstruck that the Americans could undermine their own position in the region without a second thought. If binding the region together in a peace process is no longer the cornerstone of U.S. Middle East strategy, what do the Americans have up their sleeve? Washington only has one move, which is to throw Israel under the bus.

Sure, things were bad for Israel even before Yussuf al-Qaradawi, the Qatar-based radical cleric who is the spiritual voice of the Muslim Brotherhood reappeared last week in Cairo to call for the liberation of Jerusalem. But consider the most optimistic scenario for Egypt, in which it follows the Turkish model, once a strategic ally that in the space of just a few years has become moderately hostile. Ankara’s involvement with the Mavi Marmara incident made Turkey part of an international delegitimization campaign against Israel, waged largely in Europe but making inroads now in the United States.

For instance, consider the administration’s bizarre mishandling last week of the Palestinians’ proposed Security Council measure denouncing Israeli settlements. Not only did Washington delay in vetoing a proposed resolution that in the past it would’ve batted down immediately, but the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, felt compelled to make a statement covering the administration’s flank. The veto, she explained, should “not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity.”

Washington, it seems, is tired of having to stick up for Jerusalem. It’s bad enough that having Israel’s back always sets the United States against the rest of the international community, but in the wake of the Arab uprisings, defending Israel also means that Obama has to cross the Muslim and Arab masses he’s courted ever since his 2009 Cairo speech. But nothing Washington is able to wring out of Israel never seems to satisfy anyone. Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 bought it tens of thousands of Hezbollah rockets, while its 2006 war there bought it international opprobrium. The 2005 withdrawal from Gaza that was supposed to burnish Israel’s bona fides with the international community only won it more rockets. And after the war with Hamas in the winter of 2008, Israel got the Goldstone Report.

Now, with the end of Mubarak’s regime in Egypt, Washington will have no choice but to move further away from Israel. It’s an understandable move from a superpower whose prestige is waning in the Middle East.

So what of the near future? There will still be a peace process, but it will be rather like a living will, in which the party with power of attorney, Washington, decides when to pull the plug on Israel—and how to dispose of the corpse. Indeed, the Obama Administration still wants talks between Israel and Syria—even though Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has said that a peace deal would cost his regime its life. It is Assad’s resistance to Israel, through his support of Hezbollah and Hamas and Syria’s alliance with Iran, that has endeared him to the Syrian masses. Syria is stable, said Assad, because “you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence … you will have this vacuum that creates disturbances.”

In other words, the peace treaty with Israel that Egypt signed has now been exposed as a suicide pact. In Assad’s view, the former Egyptian president’s great misstep was diverging from the beliefs of his people, who are anti-Israel. Or, as Syria’s foreign minister put it, “the leaders of regional countries should befriend their peoples. That’s the best choice.”

The notion that the Arab masses hate Israel is difficult for Washington policymakers to swallow. Their working assumption for the last several decades is that Arab rulers were responsible for anti-Israel sentiment by redirecting popular anger at their own regimes onto the tiny Jewish state. But as we’re seeing, the Arab public is more than able to voice its discontent with their rulers while also hating Israel. Whether Washington grasps the fact that Arabs hate Israel is immaterial, for Arab rulers cannot afford to forget it without losing their grip. And the United States will have no choice but to make those rulers happy if it is to pursue its interests in the region. Unfortunately, this means that Israel is no longer viable. By which I don’t mean that 6 million Jews are going to be killed, only that if they want to survive they can’t stay in Israel.

What is Mubarak like?

I don’t know him as a father, grandfather, or husband. But Mubarak the president—this is the man I knew. Mubarak the president, at end of day, for all the time, was a man who radiated a heavy atmosphere, let’s say a tiredness. He creates a certain kind of atmosphere of slowly, slowly, shwayeh shwayeh [Arabic for slow]. He doesn’t speak fast. In all the years I had the chance to sit and hear him, I never once heard him have an original idea, an initiative to offer to advance any issue, be it in the Israeli-Egyptian relationship, or relations with the Palestinians or with the Arab world. He used to repeat slogans.

You told me he has a good sense of humor.

He liked more to hear jokes. He has a rolling laugh. He likes political jokes. All in all, in this aspect, he is a typical Egyptian. He is wide, a bit round. He’s a general, in short. He has the steps and posture and confidence of a general. But I didn’t get the impression that he is the man who can bring to Egypt something like a vision of a rosy future or solutions to the problems of the economy and society. I called him the major general of the status quo. He got some sort of inheritance from President Sadat, and after 30 years he didn’t change a thing.

What are his virtues?

He was loyal to his people, the people around him. Except for one instance: I remember that someone close to him said some unnecessary word and it got out in the press, something that was harmful to the president, and he was sacked. But the people around him, he was responsive to them. He was loyal to them. He wouldn’t kick people, you know, day in day out. He retained people, he knew how to keep them together as a staff.

How did he do it?

I think it’s his military background. He is a team person. Don’t forget, he wasn’t just a military man. He was the commander of the Egyptian Air Force in the Yom Kippur War. I am emphasizing this not because of the Yom Kippur War but because of the Air Force. He’s not just a general like in the artillery or Golani or even tanks, who could have just a high school education. No. A commander in the air force is a person who is educated in university and afterward in a military academy. In his time it was in the Soviet Union. He knows Russian, he studied in the Soviet Union at a military academy in Moscow. Let’s put it this way, it’s a class, it’s aristocracy.

But until today I think if I have to count his achievements, in 30 years I would say he has this issue of keeping Egypt alive over 30 years—this is an achievement. Here in Israel if I would say the fact that the prime minister of Israel manages to maintain us so we can eat pita and onion and fava beans for breakfast and at night cucumber, tomato and garlic, and that this was an achievement, they would kill me. But in Egypt there are 85 million people and more than 40 percent of the population makes less than $2 a day. I point to this as an achievement of Mubarak because somehow he managed to maintain this for 30 years.

The problems that the Egyptians are complaining about—poverty, a lack of employment, corruption—were these also complaints when Mubarak first took power?

The economic problems in Egypt are antique. Very old. Egypt, we know it from the Bible with Joseph, who came to the Pharaoh and told him about seven bad years and seven good years. There are ups and downs, but mainly downs, and if you don’t prepare for the downs you are in deep trouble.

Egypt has been in grave trouble economically and socially for many years. Keeping the Egyptian nose a little bit above sea level and being able to go on breathing is an achievement. There are almost 1.3 to 1.5 million new babies born every year. This means the population growth eats all economic achievements and social achievements. There are not enough schools. The universities are in bad shape. Egypt is not self-sufficient in any kind of foodstuff. Almost everything is imported, and Egypt pays a huge amount of money, especially for flour and grain. More than 70 percent of Egyptian flour is imported, and prices are going up because of the floods in Australia.

In the bottom line, whoever will be the next president from the left or right, whether it is a Muslim or a general, there is no solution in sight for Egypt and nobody is offering any solution. Take a look at the demonstrators, the various factions, the so-called liberals, lefties, Muslims, generals, the old government, the new government—nobody is talking about any solution to bring Egypt into an economic takeoff. A takeoff is an expression that means a trend that could take years, but at least you start the takeoff with a lot of effort in order to one day be able to fly easy.

We are on the verge of replacing one dictatorship, the regime of Mubarak—which is undemocratic—with another dictatorship that will be a theocracy led by the Muslim Brotherhood. It will be much worse, as far as democracy and liberal values in Egypt are concerned, than the rule of Mubarak. No less important, it will be very hostile to the U.S., to the West, and to Israel. What’s the point of replacing one despot with another who is going to be even worse?

Has Mubarak been a good ally to Israel?

We cannot talk about being an ally. Israel and Egypt have complicated relations. They are not simple, and they are not normal. There are components of peace between the two countries. There are diplomatic relations, with embassies in Tel Aviv and Cairo. There are trade relations that have reached over $150 million a year, and there is the academic center in Cairo for Israeli studies and Hebrew studies. There are very good relations on the level of the armies. The two armies have very good channels of dialogue. Whenever there is a problem, they get on the phone, they solve the problems, and they are very efficient on the military level. And many Israelis travel to Egypt as tourists.

What about Mubarak the man? Do you feel like at official meetings he would treat you differently because you were Israeli?

No, with Mubarak there was no problem. Whenever an Israeli official guest, a minister, came on an official visit to Egypt, he was accepted immediately by President Mubarak. Mubarak would see him, even if he was the minister of trade, or a minister from the Shas party.

We used to sit, two people from our side, and the same from the Egyptian side, the president of Egypt leading his small delegation, and the Israeli guest, I as ambassador was on his right. We used to sit and talk and discuss even when there were some tough issues. It was always polite. There was not any anger expressed or anything confrontational or insulting. It was very elegant, very gentlemanly.

And was he warm in these meetings?

There was nothing special on a personal basis. He wanted to listen to his guests’ ideas about the Middle East, about the Israelis and Palestinians. He would inquire of each Israeli minister—from the Labor party, from the Likud, from Shas, and later of course from Kadima—he would inquire about the position of each party regarding the Palestinian issue, the Syrians. He was very curious. He wanted to know, to understand the Israeli political map.

Do you think he did understand it?

I believe so. He wanted to know. Not only did he know that his guest was from a certain party with a particular position, but he knew also that within one party there could be various opinions.

What did the meeting room look like in the presidential palace?

This is a palace from days of the kings in Egypt. Huge, all marble, very elegant and very impressive. There were so many rooms and halls and reception halls. So many. And offices, and chambers and each was done in an oriental decoration style. But very elegant.

What about his house?

His house is not far from the presidential palace, in Heliopolis. It is a private villa. It’s modern, but relatively modest, there was nothing to write about, to report about. It was nice but not something extraordinary. I have seen in Egypt nicer villas that belong to the rich people. From this point of view, he wasn’t part of the nouveau riche.

Is he in touch with the poor?

I cannot tell you. If I had to think about why all this came now, this explosion, one of the reasons for this uprising is that he was disconnected from the people. He didn’t listen to their wishes. For example the fact that the Egyptian in the street did not want, and was very much against, the idea of his son succeeding him. For five or six years, I was following this fiasco of Mubarak preparing his son for the presidency. The people spoke carefully, but I could get their rejection of the idea that Egypt is like Syria and that a son can succeed his father in a republic. And they said in so many words: “We are not Syria.”

How do you feel toward Mubarak now?

I really pity him. It’s pathetic what’s happening, and I’m sorry. The man is very sick, and I really would not want what happened to the president of Tunisia to happen to him. I would want him to get up and abdicate in an elegant way. I don’t want him to be chased out of Egypt, or that people should do something bad to hurt him. He is already badly, badly hurt. He feels betrayed. The man, for 50 years and more, served the Egyptian people and all of the sudden the Egyptian people are tearing him to pieces.

At any rate, it’s pathetic and I pity him. But he’s either stubborn or stupid, and it’s impossible to convince him what to do. And there is also the problem of to whom do you pass the government, what do you do? How do you assure that the leadership will be passed in an orderly fashion? Let’s say to another general? Even among all the millions who are going wild there, they don’t have a leader who will replace Mubarak tomorrow morning.

Who do you think he is turning to?

I don’t know. I think he is sitting there in the palace, and consulting of course. I am not sure he is sleeping at night. He is closed up. The two times he gave a speech it was from the palace. I remember that hall for press conferences he used to hold. He has twice addressed the people in the last few days, and in those two times he didn’t leave the palace. He was in the presidential palace. I know the room.

At one point in my recent interviews with Israeli President Shimon Peres, I ask him why his mentor David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding prime minister, in choosing among many promising young men of his circle, selected Peres as his aide. Perhaps motivated by modesty, the 87-year-old Peres doesn’t offer a clear explanation. But without doubt, the “old man,” as Ben-Gurion was often called, had spotted the youngster’s oratorical and intellectual brilliance, which has entranced world leaders, though not always the Israeli public.

At home, Peres’ persona was shrouded for decades in a pall of popular distrust. He lacked credibility among many Israelis—which explains, in part, his inability to win general and internal Labor Party elections. Rabin repeatedly beat him, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, in contests for the Labor leadership. One result of the bad blood between the two was that Rabin called Peres an “indefatigable underminer” (hatran bilti nil’eh), a description Peres thought unjustified. But the charge stuck and thereafter shadowed his political career. Though the two men apparently worked well together during Rabin’s second premiership, in 1992-1995, when Peres served as foreign minister, Peres proved unable to shake off their troubled history. Rabin’s martyrdom reinforced what he had left behind as his legacy. Peres eventually, only on his second try, won the presidency—not by popular majority but by Knesset vote.

How deeply he believes in his oft-proclaimed vision of a “new Middle East” after a decade of disappointment and terror is anyone’s guess. The hard core of “Mr. Security” surely remains: Hamas rocketeers and Turkish “peace flotillas,” and, possibly, Iranian nuclear madmen need to be forcibly contained and faced down. Beneath his polished, world-weary exterior, he is still the ex-defense minister who believes that for a stable Israel, security concerns must take the highest priority and that any chance of peace is ultimately contingent on Israel’s strength, and he seems to carry considerable clout as adviser and elder statesman with the current brood of politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Despite his repeated failures to win election as prime minister, Peres is now a highly popular president, distanced from the daily toil of politics in the largely ceremonial head-of-state role, with a steady 78 percent public approval rating.

I interview Peres in his office, seated around a coffee table. He wears a suit and tie, about which he complains (“I meet diplomats all day”). His media adviser, Ayelet Frish, and her assistant sit with us throughout the two interviews, which were conducted in the Presidential Mansion in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh quarter in early July and lasted for approximately 80 minutes each. Ayelet occasionally interjects, “That’s off the record,” when she feels her boss has said something excessively revealing. I’m not sure he remembers that I had interviewed him in the past, when I worked at the Jerusalem Post in the 1980s and he was Israel’s foreign minister. I can clearly picture a briefing he gave to journalists accompanying him to Alexandria, where he was to visit Egypt’s president, Hosni Mubarak. Peres had sat in an armchair in the center of his hotel room, and the journalists were draped over assorted chairs or seated on the carpet. I remember that he was brilliant. A quarter of a century on, he appears more tired, his voice weaker; perhaps altogether not quite as sharp.

I ask him about the 1948 war, in which some 700,000 Arabs fled or were driven out of the area that became the Jewish state. (Over the past three decades, I have written extensively about the war, devoting three books to the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1947-1949. Peres, as far as I know, has never publicly commented on my books—though I have sensed, over the years, a certain displeasure on his part with my findings, which many viewed as critical of Israel and Ben-Gurion.)

A few months ago, I was pleasantly surprised to receive a handwritten letter from him praising a highly critical review I had written of a book by an anti-Israeli British historian. (At the start of our first interview earlier this month, Peres commented on my recent book, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War, saying it highlighted for him the failings of personal memory. But he did not elaborate.) The war ended with Israel having an Arab minority of some 160,000, representing 15-20 percent of its citizenry. Today, Israel’s Arab minority, 1.3 million strong, identify themselves as Palestinians, occasionally riot, and support Israel’s enemies during bouts of hostilities (as when Israel fought Lebanon’s Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza in 2008-2009).

Morris: Perhaps ending the 1948 war with this demographic was a mistake?

Peres: No, moral considerations took priority over demographic considerations. Ben-Gurion knew that every war and conflict takes place twice—once on the battlefield and then in the history books. He didn’t want things to be written in the history books that were in dissonance with the foundations of Judaism. He really believed that without a moral priority there is no existence for the Jewish people. To expel he saw as contrary to his moral values.

But in 1948 he sometimes gave orders to expel.

He did not give orders to expel.

I suggest that Ben-Gurion did in fact give such orders, as when, on July 12, 1948, he authorized the expulsion of Arab inhabitants of the towns of Lydda and Ramleh on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road. Peres shakes his head. “I remember sitting in the room, when the matter of the expulsion of the Arabs from Haifa began, when Ben-Gurion telephoned [Labor Party strongman, later Haifa mayor] Abba Khoushi and told him to do all he could to get the Arabs to stay [in Haifa]. I heard this myself. I was there.” (It is worth noting that the Arabs of Haifa were not expelled but fled the city at the end of April 1948, due in part to a decision of the local Arab leadership.)

Next: The first decade of the Jewish state

Its name was Yamit, and I soon learned that the sea—its Hebrew word is Yam—was at the center of life in town. At some point in every day, most of Yamit’s 2,500 residents would find themselves on the beach. I was only in the second grade when we moved there, but I quickly learned to emulate the morning routine of the town’s older kids: get up each morning at five to look at the waves and decide if the day should be spent surfing or at school. I remember shoes being worn only when absolutely necessary and evenings spent huddling together with the other families—most of them, like us, young parents and young children—in the town’s square, watching movies on an outdoor screen or just chatting. Life in Yamit was heaven.

It didn’t last long. In 1979, after Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David peace accord with Egypt, we were told we would soon have to leave our homes and watch as Yamit, along with the rest of Sinai, was handed back to the Egyptians.

It was the second major trauma my father had to face in a decade. After Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six Day War, my father was working in Sinai, building fortifications for the Israeli Army that were supposed to be Israel’s impenetrable line of defense against the Egyptians. Sinai was about 600 kilometers from our home, so we would see my father for only one day each week. He’d come home on Tuesday evening, each time looking more dusty and disheveled. And he always seemed eager to get back to work, back to the desert. To make up for lost time, he’d ply me with presents: a toy car, sneakers, a new bicycle.

Then came the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the impenetrable line that took up six years of my father’s life collapsed under the invading Egyptian Army in less than 24 hours. My father came home looking defeated. He was 32 with four children and no clue. Yamit, for him—for us—was a new beginning, a rebirth.

Settlers Saviona and Tsali Maneh hold their infant son, Itai, outside their bomb shelter near Yamit, March 10, 1972.
CREDIT: Moshe Milner/GPO via Getty Images

But as much as we cherished life in Yamit, we weren’t naïve. Israel had captured Sinai once before, in 1956, and was forced by international pressure to withdraw. After recapturing it in 1967, Israel never annexed the desert peninsula, making us Israeli citizens living in a state of uncertainty. Evacuation was a possibility we’d all entertained. Almost every family had relatives somewhere in Israel who said that it was only a matter of time before the government gave Sinai back, that we would end up as collateral.

But Begin himself had reassured us: He visited town often, and each time he did he promised us that when he retired, he would move to Yamit and be our neighbor. We believed him, and we loved him for it.

A short time after the Camp David peace accord was signed, Begin arrived for another visit. He landed with his helicopter near the giant eucalyptus tree in the center of town, spraying sand in the eyes of the angry and hurt people who came to meet him. Begin stepped off the helicopter, dashed through the sands, and crossed the road that encircled the city. More people gathered, but Begin kept marching, past the local police, the fire station, and the post office. Just before the synagogue, he took a sharp turn, and as he was about to climb the stairs to city hall, a young girl emerged from the building, barefoot and wearing a bikini. “You took my house!” she shouted at the prime minister. “You son of a bitch.”

Three years later, on April 23, 1982, the last family had left Yamit, and our empty homes were bulldozed or blasted by the army.

My family and neighbors had left Yamit, but Yamit had never left us. Soon after the evacuation, those of us who still kept in touch started noticing that life had gotten oddly unlucky. Family after family would report instances of death and divorce, suicides and bankruptcies. We thought it was just a miserable coincidence, that when it rained, as the saying goes, it poured. But it didn’t take long to realize our problems were never coincidental. Even the level-headed among us agreed that what we evacuees were dealing with was Yamit’s curse.

***

Israeli women and their children gather in Yamit’s city center, December 10, 1981.
CREDIT: Ya’akov Sa’ar/GPO via Getty Images

By now, Israel has had ample experience forcefully resettling civilian populations, most notably when it evacuated 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip five years ago. By 2005, the soldiers and bureaucrats whose job it was to empty a stretch of land of its Jewish inhabitants had been trained, and the population had grown accustomed to seeing Israeli law-enforcement personnel drag away Israeli citizens from their soon-to-be-destroyed homes, often with both sides weeping. But, back then, when Begin landed in town and told us that Yamit would have to be evacuated, nobody could imagine what such an evacuation might look or feel like or how it might be carried out.

“There are long-term implications of such dislocation, the dissolution of people’s dreams,” says Stevan Hobfoll, chair of the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Rush University Medical Center, who researches the psychological implications of Israel’s territorial disengagements. “Ongoing disruption is related to depression in particular and anxiety disorders generally. There are reverberations to these things. Perhaps you were planning to have a certain life course, and your life course has changed, and you may not have as good opportunities, and you may experience this as a failure, and now you feel like a failure.”

With no mental-health services available to Yamit’s refugees, the government paid each family a small compensation and considered the case closed. But Yamit’s residents found it exceedingly hard to fit in anywhere else; having grown accustomed to a carefree life on the Mediterranean, living anywhere else seemed like an insufferable compromise.

This was the case with Uzi and Sima Greenberg. They had immigrated to Israel from Romania and came across Yamit by mistake, visiting Gaza and taking a wrong turn along the way. “This was our dream,” Sima said recently in Dekel, referring to the couple’s small apartment across the street from Yamit’s swimming pool, surrounded by likeminded young and idealistic families.

Since Uzi was working for the Israeli Army, they were forced to be one of the first families to leave, as their apartment belonged to the Army. One day a representative from the Army came to the Greenbergs’ apartment, inspected it, and charged them for every broken blind or scratch on the floor.

“This was the small deception: They charged me for a broken blind and then proceeded to destroy the whole place,” Uzi said. “But the big deception was a government asking common people to volunteer and inhabit Sinai and then pulling the plug on them.”

After the evacuation the Greenbergs went through a long period of depression. They refused to leave their house and meet other people. Even after they moved to Dekel, a new community in the northwestern Negev made up entirely of Yamit refugees, they were inconsolable. It took them almost a year to bring themselves to finish building their new house. In the meantime, they lived with stripped walls, bare water pipes, and exposed electrical wires.

Eventually, they opened a grocery store in their back yard. But whereas everyone in Yamit was friendly, the same people, having suffered the trauma of evacuation, were now profoundly changed. Neighbors who had once spent all day consorting amicably in Yamit were yelling at each other in Dekel. The Greenbergs were no different, and within months their fledgling business was on the verge of bankruptcy; their neighbors, it appeared, preferred the 10-kilometer drive to the nearest grocery store to giving the Greenbergs a bit of business.

The Greenbergs grew distrustful. They took all of their money out of the bank and hid it in their home. They ran up debt, lost weight, found God. Debtors began coming by the house and confiscating the Greenbergs’ possessions. Eventually, Uzi couldn’t take it anymore. He would leave the house for long stretches, and when he returned he threatened to burn the house down with his family in it. Once, falling short of his threat, he nonetheless spray-painted slogans on the walls of his own home: “Stinking House,” he wrote. Sima wasn’t doing much better: Finding the stress impossible to handle, she set the family’s dog on fire. Uzi had her committed to a psychiatric hospital. Outside, in their yard, the two palm trees they brought with them from Yamit withered.

***

Israeli soldiers evacuate a young Yamit settler, April 20, 1982.
CREDIT: Beni Tel Or/GPO/Getty Images

The Greenbergs weren’t the only ones whose lives came undone after leaving Yamit. The more stories we heard, the more deeply we believed that a curse did exist and that it plagued all of us who were forced to evacuate Yamit. In some cases—fatal car crashes, sudden cases of cancer—the curse was the only palpable explanation we could find. But for the most part, the misfortunes that befell us and our neighbors were simply the result of young people being subjected to intense psychological pressures, misunderstood and lacking support.

Much of the curse had to do with the ways Yamit’s refugees were portrayed in the media. Shortly before the evacuation, a delegation of a few dozen religious settlers from the West Bank made their way by sea into Yamit, bypassing the Army roadblock that stopped everyone but Yamit’s residents from getting into town. With their beards and yarmulkes, the West Bankers couldn’t look more different from the people of Yamit—secular, tanned, scantily dressed—if they tried. But most Israelis never met anyone from Yamit; to them, a settler was a settler, whether he lived in Samaria or in Sinai. The West Bankers locked themselves in cages, resisted with force, and acted out all kinds of theatrical scenarios that the mainstream residents of Yamit found terrifying. Still, however, when Israelis think of Yamit, it’s these images that come to mind.

While the West Bankers were doing their best to be visible and vocal, most of our neighbors were doing their best to remain calm and practical. They negotiated timelines and bottom lines with government officials, received their compensation, and moved elsewhere. But even they were not free of stigma: As they settled in towns and communities all across Israel, Yamit’s refugees were often accused of being gold-diggers—calculating opportunists who moved to Sinai knowing it would be returned to Egypt and anticipating the monetary compensation. Worst of all, for many Israelis, ecstatic about Begin’s coup of statesmanship, the people who fought to keep their homes in Yamit were enemies of peace.

Confronted with such vicious accusations, the residents of Yamit often chose to disconnect from the rest of Israel.

On the last day of the evacuation, for example, Avi Farchan, the most active organizer of protest against the decision, said his goodbyes, went home, and asked the Army officer in charge of the operation to lower the flag to half-mast. Tough officers and cynical journalists both cried uncontrollably. Then, Farchan walked in to his empty house, lay on the floor, and sobbed. When he finally got up, he felt that he needed to walk. He walked for days, until he reached Jerusalem. He had the flag from Yamit with him, and he left it with the Western Wall’s rabbi. Then, he packed his family into their car and drove south once more, as far as they could go, to a new community in the Gaza Strip called Eli-Sinai.

In 2005, the Farchans were evacuated once more. Again, there was talk of a curse. But the real curse, Avi Farchan said, wasn’t cast on the residents on Yamit; rather, he argued, the residents of Yamit had cursed the state of Israel.

“After Yamit,” he said, “Begin completely deteriorated, and Ariel Sharon, who made the unforgivable decision to blow up the houses in Yamit, invaded Lebanon two months later, and look what happened to Sharon after the evacuation from Gaza.”

***

Israeli schoolchildren near Yamit, March 10, 1972.
CREDIT: Moshe Milner/GPO via Getty Images

A year after the evacuation, my oldest sister, Orna, died from a brain tumor. She was 19. When we went through her belongings, we found poems she’d written as we were getting ready to leave Yamit. They were typical displays of teenage angst, but instead of swooning over a lover, Orna was mad at the world for taking away her home. “I sat on the beach,” read one poem, “and pondered the pinkish dream/ that I drew/ and it was destroyed/ and so was I/ and I drowned.”

A few days before the evacuation, we sat down and had one last meal, with tears in our eyes. Someone took some spray paint and wrote: “Avrahami Family, 15.4.82, Yamit” on the external wall of our house. Ten days later this wall was taken on a truck to a nearby place together with all of our belongings, including my surfboard that I have never used since. My father made a point to return a day after we were evacuated, sit on the golden dunes, and watch how the explosives shattered his dream, like someone watching his own execution.

Orna’s death was just the beginning of our Yamit curse. After she passed away, my father escaped to New York, bought designer clothes for hundreds of dollars, and gave them away to homeless people, just because it was money from Yamit. Like many of our former neighbors, he believed that if he put the money he got from the government to good use, it would mean that he’d come to terms with losing his home, with losing Yamit. With the money soon squandered, he became homeless himself, washed dishes in return for a bed somewhere, got cancer, recovered, and died in a car accident in 1994 in one of his endless rides, aimlessly driving to nowhere in order to forget. But for him, and for the rest of Yamit’s refugees, the signs were there all along. “Caution,” they read, “the past is ahead of you.”

Frankel was born in Berlin in 1918, the daughter of an affluent family of assimilated Jews. She lost her mother when she was two years old and her father, a textile manufacturer and an officer in the German army, shortly thereafter. Sensing the looming catastrophe, concerned relatives sent her to Palestine in 1933.

She arrived there, an angry and confused 15-year-old, and found solace in Hashomer Ha’tzair, the socialist youth movement, and the Palmach, the pre-army Jewish militia fighting for the nascent state’s birth. When the War of Independence broke out in 1948, Frankel, then a woman in her thirties, rushed to join in the battle. “I shot,” she reminisced to an Israeli newspaper later in life, “and I killed.”

After the war, Frankel settled down on a kibbutz, spending half of her week working in the fields and the other half writing. She had a husband, a home, and a nation she’d helped deliver, but her mind wandered back to the broad boulevards of Berlin. Her first novel, a multi-volume opus titled Saul and Johanna, was an attempt to reconstruct the world that was ravaged by Hitler, a universe of Jews unburdened by the spiritual yoke of millennia and of Germans grasping for a path back to greatness after the ravages of World War I.

Frankel traveled to Berlin, revisited her childhood streets, spoke to old friends. She was devastated to learn that even some of those who weren’t overtly anti-Semitic found solace and hope in the Nazis’ pomp and parades. It was all the insight she needed into the human psyche, and it infused her novel with a steely, if elegant, determination. By the book’s end, Germany becomes less a specific nation grounded in a particular reality and more a metaphor for Jewish history itself, a tidal wave of hatred and persecution that can only be contained by the forces of Zionism and the borders of a strong and free Israel.

When it was published in 1957, the first installment of Saul and Johanna enjoyed critical praise, and many expected Frankel to become a force in the nation’s burgeoning literary scene. She never did. For the most part, her contemporaries had little use for the tragedies of German Jewry; they needed authors like Moshe Shamir or poets like Haim Guri, chroniclers of Israel’s home-brewed bravery, mythmakers who enshrined the here and the now. No one wanted to hear about Germany. No one cared for the Diaspora.

Soon enough, then, Frankel shifted her focus, and began writing about Israel’s warriors, the brazen, bronzed men whose military antics were the stuff of legend. In a way, it was a logical step to take—having put the embers of Europe behind her, she now concerned herself with the raging fires of Israel. Impressed with her commitment to military affairs, the Israel Defense Forces offered her a position; at 41, a recent widow, she put on a uniform and began covering the army’s operations during the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

Her new job had a profound effect on Frankel. The socialist ethos of the kibbutz movement, in whose ideological glow she comforted herself since childhood, began to fade in her mind. Communal living and left-wing politics began to seem strange, misplaced, too reminiscent of the same brand of universalism to which so many German Jews subscribed before the fall. She left the kibbutz, moved to Tel Aviv, and made the army her life.

It, too, let her down. Witnessing the near-debacle of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, she became disillusioned with the state of the nation. Israelis, she wrote, were “a people gnawed by destruction and decay,” led by aging leftists who had lost sight of Zionism’s true meaning. Having witnessed one community of self-deceiving Jews en route to ruin, she refused to witness another, and sought solace in religion. Israelis, she thought, were as guilty as German Jews of abandoning Judaism in favor of more modern ideologies, an original sin for which a nation was usually punished by death.

“I think that something very difficult is happening to the Jewish people in the land of Israel,” she said in an interview in the early 1980s. “This secular state won’t be around for a long time. I don’t believe in it. I see it slowly unraveling.”

Tel Aviv, of course, was no city for anyone turning her back on secular Israeli life. Frankel left town, resigned her position in the army, and moved to Kiryat Arba, a Jewish settlement near Hebron. There, she gradually became both religious and a right-wing ideologue. In 1988, for example, after the first Palestinian intifada erupted, Frankel gave a speech stating that because Palestinian women and children participated in the hostilities against the IDF, they should be seen “not as women and children but as those who come to kill us” and must therefore be preemptively killed themselves.

That last sentence, a paraphrase of a well-known rabbinic dictum, demonstrated just how far the daughter of the enlightenment and the author who sought insight in psychological motives had traveled. From that point on, whenever Frankel wrote or spoke, she did so, most often, with the fiery passion and the loaded language of the biblical prophets.

“My spirit and my soul were set ablaze,” she wrote in one typical passage, “and the spark that burned within me was stronger than fear itself. I was awarded a pure moment that shall never again wither away. The sunlight shone bright through the fog and the heat, and it was my own rainbow, the sign of the covenant between Hebron and myself.”

More than anything, the universalist-turned-socialist-turned-Zionist craved roots, and she found them in the town where Abraham was buried. For all of its discord and contention, life in Hebron gave her what Berlin and the kibbutz and Tel Aviv never could, a sliver of sacred earth, a sense of place.

It came at a price. For the most part, the Israeli literary elite, predominantly secular, saw Frankel’s transformation as a slow descent into fanaticism and the false comforts of dogma. She was now considered a settler, not a writer, and very few bothered reading her later work. They missed much. Her last book, published in 2003, is a history of the Jewish community in Hebron, ending with the massacre of 67 Jews, in 1929, by vengeful Arab militants; researching the book, Frankel, by this point an octogenarian, interviewed survivors of the old community in Hebron and wove together a rich and artful tapestry of daily life in one of history’s most ancient Jewish towns. Subtle as it was, the book’s context was hard to escape: in Hebron, Frankel discovered a town that existed before Zionism and that, taking its strength from its adherence to the Bible and its covenants, would exist long after the secular Jewish state collapses.

But she was destined to move once again. Her request, upon her death, was to be buried back in the kibbutz, next to the long-deceased husband she had loved. Being near him mattered to her more than any of the ideologies that attracted and disappointed her in life. In dying, Naomi Frankel finally found a home.

Promised Lands, which will have a rare screening in Brooklyn on Tuesday. She couldn’t have picked a more dramatic moment: the Yom Kippur War was raging, and everywhere Sontag trained her camera she found a country newly despairing over the future prospect of living in peace with its Arab neighbors. The Israel of 1973, it turns out, is depressingly, and clarifyingly, familiar.

Before we can talk about the film, though, it’s helpful to consider the filmmaker: Susan Sontag, director? She is famous for her essays, of course, and for her glamorous, engagée intellectual activism. She was also one of the first American writers to take cinema seriously, an early champion of foreign auteurs like Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and particularly Jean-Luc Godard.

Promised Lands, released in 1974, was her third film, and first documentary. Both her inexperience and her influences show in the frequently tedious movie, which seems like the work of someone who is a little too obsessed with Bresson’s viscously slow films. More problematic are the film’s meandering, structureless form and its utter refusal to aid the viewer: so radical is Sontag in her cinematic purity, that the film’s interviewees are not even identified. Unsurprisingly, The New York Times panned it at the time of its release; The New Republic’s Stanley Kauffmann was only a little more encouraging.

Despite its flaws, however, and despite the fact that the reality Promised Lands depicts undoubtedly reflects Sontag’s deliberate and somewhat politicized choices, the film provides a valuable document of a traumatized society. Consisting largely of interviews with prominent Israelis, accompanied by regional music that is periodically juxtaposed with what sounds like artillery fire, Sontag’s camera takes its time, lingering for minutes on a ceremony at Jerusalem’s War Cemetery, empty tanks and dead bodies on the battlefield, a funeral for a fallen solider, a center for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder, and, always, the gorgeous hilly landscape that everyone in the region seems to be constantly fighting and dying over.

“We have this pogrom complex here,” explains Yoram Kaniuk, the leftist Israeli writer, who is Promised Lands’ conscience and main voice. He adds, “And this time, in this war, it was almost so.” Speaking into a microphone in a nondescript hotel room, smoking a pipe, Kaniuk looks worried and sad. He and others like him are the film’s greatest asset, allowing viewers an unmitigated glance at the distraught consciousness of those days.

Watching the film from a distance of three decades, viewers—especially ones vaguely familiar with Sontag’s intellectual commitments—may wonder what interest she found in the topic, especially as she had rarely, before or since, seriously explored Israel or even her own Jewish heritage. Sontag seems to have wondered as well: in a brief essay in Vogue, published around the time of the film’s release, she insisted on her subject matter’s “uncanny fit with themes in my writings and other films.” The fit isn’t immediately apparent, though, and the film’s numerous declarations of sympathy for Israel are surprising coming from the staunchly leftist Sontag.

But one element of the film that does seem to jibe with Sontag’s other preoccupations is its tragic element. “Being rather tuned into sadness, to the tears in things, I put a lot of that in Promised Lands,” she wrote in Vogue. “Alas, it’s not just in my head. It’s what Israel does seem to me, at this moment, to be about.” The film presents, in a subtly polemical fashion, a tragic trajectory for the Israeli experience, consisting of three distinct, non-overlapping epochs.

The first, spanning from Zionism’s fin de siècle beginnings to June 1967, features the pure land of Labor Zionism, during which, as Kaniuk puts it, the Jews “took a lot of beautiful things out of Judaism and merged it with Tolstoy and song and dance.” This Israel is the star of the film’s most powerful segment. Sontag, the famed analyst of campiness, films a Tel Aviv wax museum that depicts great moments in Israel’s history, from Theodor Herzl orating to David Ben-Gurion feeding milk to a lamb with a baby bottle. That the scenes, despite their kitschiness, manage to inspire suggests just how invigorating the Zionist project had been at its inception.

The final wax diorama is of a Jewish soldier weeping at the Western Wall: perhaps the iconic image of the 1967 war, it was the moment that both culminated and, as the film goes on to explain, killed that first epoch. For after Israel’s stunningly lopsided victory, it became an incredibly confident modern consumer society—“Like America in the ’50s,” Kaniuk sighs. “Socialism went out the window. In Kaniuk’s analysis (and by extension Sontag’s), post-’67 Israel made a gargantuan error in overconfidently failing to extend magnanimity to its foes, justly vanquished though they were. And what does pride come before? Kaniuk reminds us, in what could serve as the film’s epigraph: “The Jews never understood tragedy. That is why the Greeks invented tragedy, and we invented, kind of, drama. In the Bible, there is no tragedy. Because tragedy is where a right is opposed to another right. And here is two rights opposing each other. The Palestinians have a full right to Palestine, and the Jews have a full right to Palestine.” He adds, “Do you have any solution to a tragedy? Of course you don’t.”

And so Promised Lands concludes by depositing us squarely in Israel’s third epoch, where the imperative is not to reclaim and restore the land, nor to build a modern, successful state that also happens to be Jewish, but merely to keep on keepin’ on. Now, viewed 35 years later, the tragedy articulated by Sontag’s movie is not that Israel failed to survive. The tragedy, rather, is that survival remains Israel’s most ambitious goal.