JWR Wandering Jews

Jewish World Review Nov. 2, 1998 /12 Mar-Cheshvan, 5759


Cancer Jerusalem Diarist

Peace for rent?

If policies at Avis, Hertz, or Budget are any indicator of things to come, we're in deep, deep trouble.


By Hillel Goldberg

HAS PEACE DESCENDED ON ISRAEL, or has fear? No matter what Clinton, Netanyahu and Arafat negotiate, the reality on the ground is chilling.

I must have seemed like a naif to the clerk who rented me a car. Two weeks ago, I was at an office on King David St. in downtown Jerusalem, right across from the famous King David Hotel. The clerk and I were going through the standard questions on insurance, accept, decline, etc. When we were done, the clerk said, "Of course, this insurance does not apply in the 'areas.'"

"What do you mean?"

"You cannot drive the car in Palestinian areas. The insurance is not applicable there."

"What?"

I was puzzled. I had never rented a car -- including in Israel -- with restrictions on where I could drive. I didn't get it.

"You cannot drive in Palestinian areas."

"You mean I cannot visit the Tomb of Rachel?"

"No."

"What about Hebron?"

She laughed. "That, of course not."

"What happens if I visit the Tomb of Rachel?"

"You're not covered --- not for anything. Damage, accident, theft --- nothing."

I am only a visitor. I don't live with the daily reality of Israel. It took me a few seconds to put two and two together.

Countless Israeli cars are stolen by Palestinians annually. Safely behind Palestinian lines, their Israeli owners cannot get them. More to the point, countless vehicles are stoned annually. That adds up to big dollars in broken windshields and dented bodies. The risk is so high that the insurance companies don't want to bear it, at any cost.

Think through the implications: Most people who rent cars in Israel are tourists from abroad, and all cars rented in Israel have large markings on their bodies indicating they are rental cars. Even the license plates are different. This means that any person, Jew or non-Jew, whose entire identification with the Israeli cause is payment to an Israeli company for temporary possession of an automobile is liable to be stoned and killed just for . . . for what? For simply driving along a Palestinian street.

If this is how Palestinians treat tourists to Israel, how do they treat Israelis themselves?

If an Israeli cannot drive safely down a Palestinian street, where is the peace?

We're not talking about military vehicles here, just ordinary people taking an ordinary ride in an ordinary car. The glint in the clerk's eye read my disappointment at paying for a rental car yet not being able to visit Jewish holy places, and that glint said: Don't be stupid. Don't do it. The damage to your car, which won't be covered, is nothing compared to the potential damage to your life.

She wasn't making this up. The first day I was in Israel, the news media reported two murders. Bratzlav chasidic types were immersing in a spring outside Jerusalem. Palestinians killed them. Again, this was no military confrontation.

The right-wingers say: Don't give back more territory, and reduce the number of Palestinian "policemen." The left-wingers say: The only way to prevent Palestinian violence against Jews is totally to divide the two populations. Seal them off from each other.

This isn't peace. This is fear. This isn't an affirmative relationship between two former enemy peoples; this is the same old hostility with a new name, "peace." The only difference between the right and left is whether Israel will be best protected from inevitable Palestinian violence by giving away more or less territory. On a basic change in Palestinian attitudes, there is no fundamental disagreement.

Peace will never come so long as textbooks for Palestinian grade school children contain maps without Israel. Peace will never come so long as Palestinian children are taught to hate Israelis. The values of peace, the hopes of and for peace, the great benefits of peace, are not taught to Palestinian first graders. Indeed, the very word peace is absent from Palestinian grade school classrooms.

Some worry about what Arafat says about peace in Arabic to his own people. I worry about what Palestinian elementary school teachers say about peace in Arabic to their own students. So long as they're not talking peace, it makes no difference what Clinton, Netanyahu and Arafat agree to. The first graders of 1993 -- when this peace process supposedly started -- are the young-punk stone-throwers and knife-wielders of today or tomorrow.

If you think I'm making this up, just try to rent a car in Jerusalem and travel wherever the road takes you.




Rabbi Hillel Goldberg is managing editor of the Intermountain Jewish News


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©1998, Rabbi Hillel Goldberg