Life in the bubble

Tel Aviv’s decision not to end twin-city alliance with Gaza a sign of ideological autism
Shaul Rosenfeld

When Jerusalem entertainer Avraham Suramlo was once asked whether he ever visited Haifa, he replied: “I was there twice, and it was closed.” His answer would likely be completely different had he been asked about visiting Tel Aviv. Being the “city that never sleeps,” it never closes its gates, yet at times it at appears that its withdrawal into its own bubble has erased any trace of sanity.

For example, last week the Tel Aviv City Council rejected a proposal by Council Member Arnon Giladi to annul the twin-city agreement with Gaza. On the same occasion, the Council approved a proposal brought forth by Mayor Ron Huldai, to freeze the agreement “until better days come.”

“Tel Aviv will be Geneva,” wrote renowned poet Natan Alterman in his song “Shalom,” yet just a few lines before that he wrote: “Peace is a hallucination…peace boils the blood.” Indeed, in the head and blood of her majesty, the Tel Avivian bubble, alliances, fraternity, and peace are a welcome move – even with a terrorist entity that openly declares that one of its most noble objectives is to rid itself of the “Zionist abscess.”

This is of course not the whole of Tel Aviv, and not even the majority of Tel Aviv, yet it is certainly a hard cord with significant membership and belonging to a particular political camp that safely dwells in the first Hebrew city. From Tel Aviv’s plains, this camp delivers its finest sermons, regarding “love thy enemy” and “alliances should mostly be formed with enemies” (even if their greatest desire is to exterminate you.). Indeed, Tel Aviv is the home of this camp’s greatest pipe dreams.

Hamas’ lust for murder makes no difference

This alliance between the 1998 Tel Aviv City Council, which signed the agreement with Gaza, and the 2008 Council, which preserved it, is in fact an alliance between cynics who have sold their soul to those offering the highest political price.

Even the government decision taken about six months ago that Gaza is a hostile entity, and even ceaseless terror attacks perpetrated by Gazans against Sderot residents, and even declarations by Gaza’s Hamas rulers that Israel has no right to exist are not strong enough to sever this alliance and the dream associated with it.

Apparently, such fixation can no longer be alleviated by anything – not by the severed legs of a Sderot boy, and not by the voracious Hamas lust for the murder of Jews. The Council’s decision is not only part of the typical Tel Aviv indifference, just like it’s not only an expression of the grave lack of solidarity with countrymen in the abandoned south. It is mostly about ideological autism that apparently cannot be cured.

It is easy to imagine what a mentally healthy Brit would have said in the 1940s, during and after Coventry was pulverized by the Luftwaffe, had London’s City Council decided to sign a twin-city agreement with Berlin, or at least to merely freeze the existing alliance “until better days come.”