by Elaine Durbach
NJJNBureau Chief/Central

March 06, 2008

In a prescient talk held before Israel’s weekend air and ground offensive against Hamas in Gaza, an Israeli historian told a local audience that he would oppose such action if it meant the loss of a large number of civilian Palestinian lives.

Dr. David Tal spoke Feb. 28 at the Wilf Jewish Community Campus in Scotch Plains. Discussing the ongoing rocket bombardment of Sderot and other communities in the Gaza border region, he said he has lived under rocket fire himself and is deeply concerned about the victims of those attacks. But when a member of the audience suggested that Israel retaliate with an artillery shell fired into Gaza for every rocket that comes from there, he emphatically rejected the idea.

“Israel is not allowed to kill 100 civilians to save those people,” he said. Citing a retaliatory Israeli attack on militants in Lebanon in 1995 that killed a large number of United Nations peacekeepers, he referred to the incident as “a catastrophe for Israel.”

By the Sunday following his talk, two Israeli soldiers and more than 100 Palestinians, including numerous civilians, had died during an operation launched after Hamas crews fired several rockets into Ashkelon, a coastal Israeli city of 120,000.

Tal’s audience of about 40 people responded with a cross-section of views to his remarks opposing such a raid. Responses ranged from those who cringed at the projected high death toll to a few people who insisted that Palestinian aggression had to be stopped regardless of the cost.

Faced with an audience member persisting with that latter view, Tal stuck to his own stance that a response with such an outcome would be intolerable.

“I’m not saying I’m right or that I know what the answer is, but this is my talk so I get to finish saying how I feel,” he said, cooling the moment of tension with a smile. “When it’s your talk, you get to.”

Tal’s talk was the second in a series of four lectures marking Israel’s 60th anniversary. It was hosted by the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Central New Jersey and cosponsored by the Israel Support Committee of Congregation Beth Israel, Temple Beth-El Mekor Chayim, Temple Beth O’r/Beth Torah, and Temple Emanu-El; and by the Jewish Educational Center’s Elmora Avenue and Adath Israel synagogues.

Tal, a history professor from Tel Aviv University, is an expert on Israel’s wars and on nuclear proliferation and disarmament, with a long list of books and articles. He has been teaching at Syracuse University in New York for the past two years, and before that, taught for a year at Emory University in Atlanta.

Speaking as an Israeli rather than as a historian, he said he was “really, really excited” by the audience’s interest in Sderot, the Negev town facing almost daily bombardment from Gaza.

“In Israel, we don’t think of ourselves as Jews or Zionists, but when we come to this country, and we see the level of interest and concern about Israel, being Jewish takes on a new meaning,” he said.

The audience’s concern about Sderot was heightened by a new documentary screened at the start of the event. It featured a factory in the town that has received financing from the federation’s Mack Ness Fund. The film was introduced by fund cochair Norman Weinberg.

Like the buildings throughout the community, the factory has no reinforcement to protect it from the daily threat of rockets. In the film, one worker says, “When the alarm goes off, I stand still, here. I’ve got nowhere to go.”

Weinberg pointed out that Sderot is not in disputed territory; it has always been part of Israel. The population there is disappointed, anxious, and angry at what it perceives as a lack of caring from people in the “center” of the country.

Tal said he is also deeply concerned about the people in Sderot, and he believes many in Israel are too.

Eleanor Rubin, immediate past president of the federation, asked Tal why, if there is such concern, their security is still neglected.

Tal acknowledged that while it is not as much as people in Sderot have requested, the government has provided some assistance in creating safe rooms and rocket-proof bus shelters there. He characterized Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s response as, “We’re not going to shield ourselves to death,” meaning that there is a limit to how safe a place can be made without totally suppressing normal activity.

He also blamed the delay in providing safe spaces on bureaucracy.

“There is no immediate solution,” Tal said.

Taking a longer view, he said that he sees little chance of peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians within the next 50 years.

He based that pessimism on — among other factors — the idea that hatred of Israel serves as a unifying factor for the conflicting factions within Palestinian society and on the commitment among many Arabs to eradicate Israel by force of arms.

Unlike the Israelis, the Palestinians have failed to form adequate political institutions before achieving statehood, and there is no leader with enough authority to enforce unity among them.

“They fight each other with almost the same zealousness as they fight Israel,” Tal said.

But even without the hope of a peace agreement, he said he would like to see some “creative” thinking on the part of Israeli leaders with regard to Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The harsh conditions imposed on Palestinians as a result of Israel’s occupation are, ultimately, bad for Israel, he said.

“The settlements shouldn’t have been there in the first place, and they are a huge problem for Israel,” he said.

Audience members continued with an ardent discussion for some time after Tal finished speaking.

“This is the crux of what this is about,” one woman said. “How much loss of life can we justify?”

“It was good to hear this from someone who’s for peace but who’s not airy-fairy about it,” another person commented.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” one man declared, brushing aside such views. “If we have to wipe out every person in Gaza and beyond that to protect ourselves, so be it.”

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