Israel just wants safety

The first sound you hear on landing in Israel is the rattle of applause. As the aircraft wheels touch the tarmac of Ben Gurion airport, the Israelis on board start clapping. It is a ragged, spontaneous gesture. It signifies relief at a safe homecoming, a thanksgiving for sheer survival.

To an outsider, such insecurities must seem neurotic. Five million Israelis have surely no reason to feel anxious. They have a mighty army, advanced technology and a society resilient enough to withstand the relative pinpricks of Palestinian bombs. Israel enjoys US support. It need not cede an inch of land in Gaza or the West Bank until the occupied populace accepts an imposed peace. That sounds like a position of considerable strength.

Yet survival, for the first time in decades, has returned to the agenda.

Politicians talk loudly of "the threat to Israel's existence". A banner headline in a mass-circulation newspaper warns that the Iranians have a rocket which can reach "every house in Tel Aviv". Israelis, in both private conversations and the blather of radio chat shows, are perplexed.

"I don't understand it," said a kibbutz veteran. "We win the wars, and they reverse the result." In fact, the second Palestinian intifada is a war that Israel lost.

More than 800 Israeli civilians and 2,200 Palestinians have died in the five years since Yasser Arafat blew up the peace talks and hundreds more have been disfigured or permanently disabled. Terrorism has traumatised the nation.

An elderly woman I knew all my life was blown to bits last month while travelling by bus across Jerusalem to attend a study session. Elsa Winter, her name was. Elsa came to London in 1939 on a Kindertransport from Kempen in Germany. The rest of her family perished in the war.

She was a spinster, gentle to the point of timidity, living a devout, discreet life in a Stoke Newington bedsit where she served me tepid orange juice and a biscuit when I was taken as a child to visit her. Elsa at 40 married a widower, moved to Haifa, had two children.

The harmlessness of her life is counterpointed by her shattered, pointless death.

Such tragedies touch every Israeli household. Although a truce has prevailed for almost a month, scarcely a day passes without someone being attacked in a public place in the heart of Israel - a young man stabbed to death while strolling on a beach, a cabbie kidnapped and held in Ramallah as a potential hostage for the release of convicted killers in Israeli jails. Shackled by the ceasefire, Israel has lost the initiative.

The Palestinians have won both the insurrection and its suspension - so much so that Israelis refer to the truce not by the Hebrew term, "hafsakat esh", but by the Arabic word "hudna". It is only a matter of time, many believe, before the hudna breaks down and organised terror returns to the streets, the buses and the shopping malls. Survival, in these circumstances, becomes a personal preoccupation.

But there is also a collective aspect to the anxiety, subliminal and unspoken. Israel is the only nation ever to be created by a resolution of the United Nations - a resolution in November 1947 that was immediately violated by seven Arab armies which invaded the infant state.

Much of the Arab world continues to deny Israel's right to exist, yet it is Israel which stands perpetually accused of defying the UN.

In the past five years of intifada, sophisticated Arab spin masters have subverted the original perception of Israel as a progressive society - the first, for instance, to give women the conditions to continue working after having children - and supplanted it with a caricature of an occupationist oppressor.

They have been extraordinarily successful. European governments (Britain and Norway excepted) have condemned Israel in terms once reserved for apartheid South Africa. Left-leaning media turn blind eyes to Palestinian corruption and violence but report every Israeli military action as a human-rights issue. Israel has been turned into a pariah state, vilified without right of appeal.

Most Israelis I met on my visit to the country this month felt embattled and rejected. They warmly endorsed Ariel Sharon's boycott of the BBC, which they believe to be strongly biased against them. Taken together, the personal toll of the intifada and the public slaps of demonisation have turned what was once an outwardlooking country into something more nervously introverted.

Israelis who disavow the occupation and detest Sharon feel abandoned by the world. Settlers in the occupied territories feel rejected by the rest of Israel. A hoary old Hebrew song, "Haolam Kulo Negdaynu - the whole world is against us", has regained popular currency.

There is an indigenous name for Israel's present state of mind, and it is to be found inscribed above the VIP suite at Ben Gurion airport, an area where diplomats are ushered for their first handshake and orange juice.

The suite is named the Masada Lounge after a band of Jewish zealots who, besieged by the Romans on a desert hilltop, killed themselves rather than surrender.

The Masada mentality is what Israel adopts when its back is up against the wall, which is where Islamic radicals and European Leftists have pushed it over the past five years, ostensibly in the interest of promoting peace though more commonly with the aim of destroying Israel.

Since peace cannot be achieved without Israeli agreement, the stigmatisation of Israel has proved counter-productive. The more Israel feels embattled, the less willing it will be to make concessions. The way to end the occupation is for the world to start rebalancing the peace process.

Abu Mazen, when he met President Bush on Friday, demanded an accelerated release of Palestinian prisoners, a halt to Israel's fencing-in of the West Bank and a dismantling of settlements leading to a Palestinian state in 2005.

Ariel Sharon, when he is ushered into the White House tomorrow, will insist that before any Israeli withdrawal the Palestinians must disarm terror organisations.

Both sets of demands are achievable. No rational person whom I have met on either side expects to see peace in our time. The best prospect is an uneasy stand-off, akin to the relations between India and Pakistan, but even that will only be realised once Israel can feel secure and Palestinians have a viable state to call their own.

Resolving these questions of survival lies at the root of any solution. Thatcherism begins to bite: read Norman Lebrecht's second report from Israel in tomorrow's Standard.