Op/Ed
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September 12, 2008
The Other Elections
Jerusalem
Stuart Schoffman
Special to the Jewish Times
The usual roles for Israelis and tourists were reversed a few weeks back when I attended a big warm Jewish wedding in Cartagena, Colombia. Is it safe? I wanted to know up front. One hears so much about drug wars, Marxist guerrillas, kidnapping, street crime. You take precautions, my friends told me, which is what I tell people when they ask me about Jerusalem.
Beautiful Cartagena, jewel of the Caribbean, is ringed by walls dating from the 16th century. Si me olvidare de ti, oh Jerusalén — If I forget thee, O Jerusalem — intoned the Israeli who performed the traditional ceremony. Next came hours of horahs and salsa dancing, with an emphasis on the latter. On every table sat a bottle of Black Label to go with the fried bananas. Kidnapping seemed light-years from anyone’s mind.
The father of the bride, a Polish-born businessman, threw his arm around me. “I want you to write a story,” he said. “Tell them it’s not a bunch of wild men here in Colombia. Tell them it’s safe to visit.”
Mediterranean Sephardim arrived in Colombia after World War I, joined by Ashkenazim during the early Hitler years due to immigration quotas in the U.S. Now the Jewish population has declined sharply, to about 5,000. Many Colombian Jews keep second homes in Miami, cheek by jowl in pricey high-rises with Israeli expatriates. In Jerusalem, affluent Jews from Miami (or Manhattan) own nice homes cheek by jowl with me.
I came home to Israel safe and happy to discover that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had just issued a travel warning to Israelis abroad, urging them to shun invitations from strangers, to avoid speaking Hebrew out loud. This came in the wake of reports that Hezbollah was planning to exact revenge for the assassination in Damascus in February of its kingpin Imad Mughniyeh — which Israel has denied perpetrating. South America was singled out as especially dangerous.
Meanwhile, against the backdrop of the American presidential race it’s easy to forget that our ruling Kadima party will in a few weeks elect a replacement for the tainted Ehud Olmert, and that in November Jerusalemites will select a new mayor.
The top contenders in Kadima are: the Iranian-born hawk Shaul Mofaz, former IDF Chief of Staff and current Minister of Transportation; and the more diplomatic Tzippy Livni, a lawyer and former hard-line Likudnik, who as foreign minister recently told foreign journalists that a two-state solution “is an Israeli interest” and that she wants a national-unity government to achieve that end.
Mofaz, touting himself as Mr. Security, goes out of his way to cast Livni as Golda Meir, another woman foreign minister who rose to the top job but bungled it. “I hope we don’t find ourselves,” he lately told Yediot Aharonot, “in a similar situation of having a prime minister lacking knowledge on security issues and in a war like the Yom Kippur War.”
My hunch is that Kadima voters might feel safer with Livni than with the pugnacious Mofaz, who in June raised the world price of oil by $11 a barrel — its biggest one-day spike ever — when he rashly remarked that an Israeli attack on Iran was “unavoidable” if his native land didn’t stop its nuclear program.
Meanwhile, in Jerusalem surveys indicate that Nir Barkat, the hi-tech entrepreneur who lost five years ago to the amiable Uri Lupolianksi, is favored by 49 percent of the public to the ultra-Orthodox candidate, Rabbi Meir Porush, a veteran Knesset member, who has 31 percent.
In 2003, secular voters had a pathetic 32 percent turnout; this year 73 percent of them are said ready to vote.
I won’t vote for Porush, but I will say this: The ultra-Orthodox know danger when they see it, and seek to avoid it. In fact, a trio of exalted ultra-Orthodoxy authorities — including Rav Ovadia Yosef, spiritual leader of Shas — have demanded the formal restatement of a rabbinic edict issued after the Six-Day War, prohibiting Jews from stepping on the Temple Mount. As Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky said, such an action “is more severe than any of the violations in the Torah.” It may also be, as Ariel Sharon demonstrated in September 2000, a gratuitous provocation to our Muslim neighbors.
I don’t, to be frank, fear being struck by lightning while snapping a close-up of the Dome of the Rock. What worries me is religious Zionist tour groups from North America providing new fodder for paranoid Islamist demagogues.
As my amigos in Colombia would say — life is beautiful, but it’s best to take precautions.
Stuart Schoffman, an Associate Editor at the Jerusalem Report, is a columnist for the JUF Chicago Jewish News and writes monthly for the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES.