Lamentation and relentlessness: Gaza with no end in sight

How can we explain Israel’s relentless pursuit of this seemingly endless war in Gaza? Danny Trom offers an analysis based on one symptom: the proliferation, since October 7, of kinot, poetic lamentations that are unique to the tradition of exile. Israeli lamentation is thus expressed in the language of exile and powerlessness, even though it now accompanies the war of a state through which Jews have acquired unprecedented power—and therefore a new responsibility. Danny Trom invites us to reflect on this internal tension within this paradox…

 

 

It is now clear to everyone that the war waged in Gaza by the Netanyahu government in the name of the State of Israel is morally reprehensible and devoid of the effectiveness invoked by those who are conducting it. The dual objectives of the war, to free the hostages and eliminate Hamas, have not been achieved and clearly cannot be achieved. Yet the war is being prolonged with disregard for the people of Gaza, who are condemned to a miserable fate, sometimes on the brink of starvation, daily exposed to the chaos of war and counting ever more civilian casualties, in proportions that the war aims do not justify—especially since the lives of the hostages are increasingly at risk. Whether this war is ideologically motivated or, caught in a vicious circle, reflects a headlong rush with no future, each analyst can weigh up, according to their own assessment, the combination of rationales at work here. But whatever the balance, condemnation is in order.

However, condemnation cannot replace analysis. For the observer is faced with a crucial question: what makes this endless war possible? Why do the voices of growing opposition in Israel seem unable, even at this stage of the war, to have a decisive effect on public opinion? Following the protests, which are multiplying and gaining momentum, it is clear that it is above all the fate of the hostages that moves people and sustains their commitment. While the fate of the Gazan population is also a factor—and increasingly so—it is secondary. Motivated in this way, the mobilization sometimes seems to tip the balance in favor of an agreement to end the war. But for the moment, it cannot be said that it is clearly winning the day. The goal of eliminating Hamas, which reality continues to confirm as illusory, seems to remain intact. This raises the following question: why, according to the prevailing opinion in Israel, must Hamas and other jihadist organizations be eliminated at all costs, even if this goal proves unrealistic?

The fact that this war is damaging the international reputation of the State of Israel to an unprecedented degree does not seem to sway public opinion, which is nevertheless sensitive to the image of a state whose legitimacy has been contested since its inception. Whenever the war in Gaza is denounced or its conduct deplored, the Israeli mainstream media repeats that it is a legitimate response to the massacre of October 7. This reminder has the force of chronological evidence. But something about this reminder remains enigmatic. Clarifying it requires a better understanding of what this triggering event has meant for the Israeli Jewish public, despite the passage of time. Otherwise, judgments (and more often than not, silence) about the war, with its trail of Palestinian civilian casualties, will remain opaque. For it is on this understanding that the prevailing public mood in Israel depends and, consequently, a general climate that encourages the acceptance of relentless warfare—even if the endangerment of hostages is deplored, the modus operandi widely contested, its effectiveness questioned, and the fate of the civilian population of Gaza regretted.

What makes this endless war possible? Why, according to the prevailing Israeli opinion, must Hamas and other jihadist organizations be eliminated at all costs, even if this goal proves unrealistic?

To understand the meaning given to October 7 by those who were directly affected and those who were targeted—namely, by extension, the whole of Israeli society—and to appreciate its significance, let us consider the symptom that was the proliferation of kinot following October 7. A kina is a traditional poetic form, modeled on the biblical book called Megillat Eicha (Book of Lamentations), a long poetic lament attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, pouring out his grief over the ruins of the Temple, the desolation of Jerusalem, and the misfortune of the exiled people. Here are the first three verses of the text:

1 – Alas [eicha]! There she sits, lonely, the once populous city, like a widow, the queen of nations, the ruler of peoples, now enslaved.

2 – She weeps, she weeps in the night, tears covering her cheeks: no one to comfort her among those who loved her; they have betrayed her, all her friends, now her enemies.

3 – She is exiled, Judah, miserable, harshly enslaved; remaining among the nations, she finds no rest. All her persecutors have hunted her down in her distress.

 

א אֵיכָ֣ה | יָשְׁבָ֣ה בָדָ֗ד הָעִיר֙ רַבָּ֣תִי עָ֔ם הָיְתָ֖ה כְּאַלְמָנָ֑ה רַבָּ֣תִי בַגּוֹיִ֗ם שָׂרָ֙תִי֙ בַּמְּדִינ֔וֹת הָיְתָ֖ה לָמַֽס 

ב בָּכ֨וֹ תִבְכֶּ֜ה בַּלַּ֗יְלָה וְדִמְעָתָהּ֙ עַ֣ל לֶֽחֱיָ֔הּ אֵֽין-לָ֥הּ מְנַחֵ֖ם מִכָּל-אֹהֲבֶ֑יהָ כָּל-רֵעֶ֙יהָ֙ בָּ֣גְדוּ בָ֔הּ הָ֥יוּ לָ֖הּ לְאֹיְבִֽים 

ג גָּֽלְתָ֨ה יְהוּדָ֤ה מֵעֹ֙נִי֙ וּמֵרֹ֣ב עֲבֹדָ֔ה הִ֚יא יָשְׁבָ֣ה בַגּוֹיִ֔ם לֹ֥א מָצְאָ֖ה מָנ֑וֹחַ כָּל-רֹדְפֶ֥יהָ הִשִּׂיג֖וּהָ בֵּ֥ין הַמְּצָרִֽים

 

This Megillah, read in synagogues on the annual fast day of the 9th of Av (Tisha B’Av), has been grafted onto the cumulative calamities that have befallen Israel (taken in the sense of the name of the Jewish people) throughout its history—from the destruction of the two Temples to the massacres of Jewish communities in the Rhineland during the Crusades, the medieval expulsions of Jews from France, England, and the Iberian Peninsula, the massacres in Ukraine in the mid-17th century perpetrated by the Cossacks, and the Shoah. The kinot, elegies composed in the wake of these disasters and recited on the night of Tisha B’Av, form a corpus of lamentations stylistically similar to the Megillat Eicha, such that the inaugural catastrophe—the destruction of Solomon’s Temple by the Babylonian Empire, followed by that of the Second Temple by the Romans, which inaugurated the exile of Edom that has not ended to this day—opens a series of cascading disasters, anxiously open to its continuation, whose assured end will be the unpredictable advent of messianic times. In short, this is how Jews, throughout their historical adventure and their enduring exile, have traditionally metabolized the chain of events that has led them, each time, to the brink of disaster. The 9th of Av thus concentrates in a single lament the meaning of Jewish destiny, concatenated into a single day of the Hebrew calendar.

 

 

But something about the continuity of this tradition in Israel is intriguing: this literary form, so deeply embedded in traditional Jewish life, is now being embraced from within the Israeli world by completely secularized authors. The kina has become a form of individualized expression open to appropriation. During the mourning period following October 7, it has become a source of creative inspiration for an audience detached from tradition. This revival deserves our attention, since October 7 is the only episode in Israeli national life to have prompted this kind of updating. The addition of October 7 to the list of Jewish calamities, from within a national framework that was intended to put a definitive end to this series, takes on the appearance of a chiasm.

Here is an example of a kina, composed by a survivor of the massacre at Kibbutz Nahal Oz:^[1] : 

Lamentation: Alas [Eicha] she was alone

Alas she was alone

Nir Oz, stained with blood
Sderot, as if widowed
A city stunned, and faithful to her?

Alas she was alone
In the fortified shelter
One family, and another,
and yet another, and yet another.

Alas,, they were alone
The observers at their posts, their many eyes
And there was no listening,
And no deliverance—none.

Alas, they were alone
Young [women] and young [men]
Hidden in ditches and behind bushes.
Their dancing has stopped,
And who will save them?

Alas, they were alone
Captives, both men and women
And still there
120 men, women, old people, and children.
They weep at night,
Tears on their cheeks,

And no comfort [Original text in Hebrew^[2]]

 

The codes of the kina are meticulously respected: each stanza begins with the repetition of the lament (“alas,” eicha), while the biblical vocabulary and syntax taken from the Book of Lamentations (typically the phrase “And of deliverance—none”) are scrupulously reproduced. This form gives rise to the equally traditional expression of abandonment, desolation, loneliness in the night, and above all the absence of help that runs through the poem. The kina, after having been confined to the world of tradition by the political modernity of which Zionism was a product, now seems to have broken free to become a popular mode of expression with general relevance.

If we accept that the proliferation of kinot following October 7 is a modern symptom, the question arises as to whether October 7 unleashed the buried power of tradition within this section of the Israeli majority public, heir to the hegemonic secular Zionism. Nevertheless entirely detached from the power of tradition. Should we see this as a sign of a return to tradition? Sociologists would be justified in interpreting this surge as a “regression to habitus,” a phenomenon whereby individuals immersed in crisis fall back on tried and tested patterns, however disconnected they may be from current reality. This hypothesis has the merit of being based on a common social mechanism, which tends to seek stable reference points in the general disorientation caused by a crisis. But the limitation of this understanding lies in its premise: kina is said to be unsuited to the crisis, with regression to this form being considered a simple effect of the loss of control over a reality too opaque to cope with the demands of the moment. In other words, its limitation lies in the assumption that there is indeed a mismatch with reality and, consequently, a regression to obsolete disposition.

The kinot would be obsolete precisely because the old dispositions had been definitively deactivated by the Zionist revolution, in the process of nationalizing the Jews gathered in the Land of Israel. This revolution sought to forge a new man, a Jew who would finally take on his political responsibilities, once purged of his minority habitus that led him to place his destiny in the hands of God. But then another important question arises: is the kina an indication of the failure of this revolution? Is its return a sign that the creation of the Israeli citizen as a figure transcending the Jew, a construction that Zionism placed at the heart of its achievement, has finally stalled? This question must be immediately reframed: if tradition is reemerging with such surprising vigor, to the point of producing kinot in this majority segment of Israeli society, heir to secular Zionism, once predominantly socialist and now rather liberal, is it not rather that this hegemonic Zionism itself was wavering?

 

Kina composed by Yagel Harush, entitled “Lamentation sur Be’eri,” named after Kibbutz Be’eri, the site of one of the massacres on October 7.

 

To explore this hypothesis, let us turn to Berl Katznelson^[3], a revolutionary intellectual from Minsk who emigrated to Ottoman Palestine in 1909, a leading ideologue of the Second Aliyah, co-founder of the Histadrut labor union in 1920, and editor of Davar, the daily newspaper of the Zionist-Socialist movement. Under the title “Destruction and Detachment,” published on April 9, 1934, Katznelson strongly lamented in the columns of the leading daily newspaper of which he was editor-in-chief that radical young pioneers were treating Tisha B’Av as a day of leisure, thus refusing, in his words, to “mourn our destruction, our enslavement, our bitter exile .“ ”What is the value of our liberation movement if it is not rooted in the rhythm of the people and only remembers how to forget?” he asked accusingly of this new generation of Sabra revolutionaries, whom he nevertheless understood intimately, having been one of their most influential spokesmen in the previous generation. But now Katznelson tempers this, asserting that Tisha B’Av is a day of commemoration for every Jew, including within the Yishuv, including in the new society that is in the process of consolidation: this day of lamentation is rooted in the spirit of the people as a whole, notwithstanding the revolutionary transformation brought about by a vanguard that tends to push for a break with the Jewish past.

Katznelson argues that the Jewish national revolution must be part of the continuity of Jewish history, otherwise the very meaning of the current achievement will be lost.

The danger clearly perceived by Katznelson lies here in premeditated forgetfulness: “Would we be capable today of initiating a movement of rebirth if the Jewish people had not preserved, in their hardened hearts and in their holy hinterland, the memory of destruction?” Katznelson had already addressed the pathologies of voluntary amnesia a few months earlier in an article in Davar entitled “Revolution and Tradition,” an intervention intended to rectify the political upheaval underway.^[4] As a member of the triumvirate at the head of the Labor Party (Mapai) alongside David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Tabenkin, he was an early and lucid critic of the Soviet regime within a Zionist world that had emerged from the soil of the October Revolution. In his view, the desire to rebuild everything from scratch was the cause of Bolshevism’s missteps. But Katznelson’s benevolent anger towards young people should not be attributed so much to the Marxist underpinnings of the revolution, which encouraged a clean break with the past, as to a Nietzschean vulgate in vogue since the first generation of Russian Zionists, according to which political activity can only flourish if it is completely free from the chains of the past. Katznelson’s target here is not so much the Jewish bourgeoisie as a youthful and carefree desire to erase the legacy of tradition with naive enthusiasm. Admittedly, rabbinical Judaism is the source of Jewish powerlessness, a diagnosis that gave Zionism its impetus in Eastern Europe; and yet, he points out, the project of national rebirth inherits this powerlessness, even if it opposes it.

Katznelson explains: “Man is endowed with two faculties: memory and forgetfulness. We cannot live without both. Where only memory exists, it would crush us under its weight and we would be its slaves, the slaves of our ancestors […], but if humanity had not preserved the memory of its great achievements, its noble aspirations, its periods of flourishing, its heroic efforts, its struggles for liberation, then there would be no revolutionary movement. The human race would have stagnated in eternal poverty, ignorance, and slavery.” Katznelson had undoubtedly pondered Marx’s considerations in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte on the need for contemporaries to free themselves from the yoke of their ancestors, to break free from the blind forces of inertia that weigh heavily on them to hinder transformative action; but also on the importance of drawing on the historical reservoir of accumulated seeds of progress that are still active today. According to Katznelson, rupture and continuity must therefore be balanced in such a way that the past does not hinder action, but provides the necessary support for its unfolding. He concludes that the Jewish national revolution must be part of the continuity of Jewish history, otherwise the very meaning of the current achievement will be lost. “We are still faced with the task of training our youth to rebel against ‘servility within the revolution’ in all its forms—starting with those Jews who were so enslaved to the Russian revolution that they even distributed proclamations calling for pogroms in the name of the revolution, and including the Palestinian Communist Party of our time, which acts in alliance with the pogromists of Hebron and Safed^[5],” Katznelson warns. Such excesses stem from a forgetting of the coordinates that mark the history of the Jews, inevitably turning against the Jews themselves.

Certainly, rabbinical Judaism is the breeding ground of Jewish powerlessness, and this is the diagnosis that gave Zionism its impetus in Eastern Europe; and yet, the project of national rebirth inherits it, even if it opposes it.

A skilled dialectician, Katznelson warns the radical youth movement not to saw off the branch on which it sits. Action unbound from the past will certainly be free of all constraints, but it will be blind, without direction or compass, like a drunken boat crashing on the rocks of reality. The action will then prove to be self-destructive. That is why Katznelson urges young people, not to conform to tradition, but to seize upon what it contains of Jewish experience, on this day of 9 Av 1934, when all Jews vividly remember the destruction, the loss of freedom and homeland, as well as the disasters that ensued throughout their exile. The Zionist project is built on this experience, without which, Katznelson adds, “neither Hess, nor Pinsker, nor Herzl, nor Nordau, nor Sirkin, nor Borochov, nor A.D. Gordon, nor Y.H. Brenner would have appeared. And Judah Halevi would not have written ‘Zion Shall Not Ask’, nor would Bialik have written ‘The Scroll of Fire.’” Tisha B’Av, inscribed in the fabric of Jewish consciousness, must be honored in order to keep in mind the meaning of the ongoing revolution, just as Passover contains the idea of liberation.

From the Tisha B’Av ignored in 1934 by a youth rebuked by its mentor, to the Tisha B’Av after October 7 configured as a kina, the path is clear. There was always, from within the socialist Zionism that dominated the Yishuv, a kind of self-correction tending to curb the “Canaanite”^[6] zeal that sought to forge a Hebrew citizen cut off from his Jewish past. Tending towards a complete break with the Jewish world of yesteryear, Zionism, in its standard expression, was nevertheless regularly and insistently brought back to its Jewish foundations by Katznelson and Ben-Gurion. It is precisely these contradictory tendencies that remain, in a diffuse way, in the minds of Israeli Jews today.

The current kina is a striking symptom of this. It seems to be in line with the rectification called for by Katznelson. Certainly, the break with a past that was described as exilic was undoubtedly one of the necessary fuels for mobilizing the energies needed for Zionist activity to succeed. However, this rebellion against the Jewish world was regularly tempered by the persistent memory of the origins of the new society. How, then, would a sociologist describe this ambivalence? He would classify it under the category of “split habitus” syndrome, whose bipolar logic must then be identified. It resides in a structural tension, subjectively experienced as an inner conflict. This tension between two poles, reignited by the crisis of October 7, invalidates the thesis that the revival of Israeli kina is simply a regression toward tradition. For the kina only represents the pole that is activated when the event is framed in such a way as to fit into the series of disasters, that is, when it directly resonates with a continuous Jewish history. The other pole, the routine one, feeds on the achievements of the Zionist revolution, which perceives the young history of the Israeli nation as a chapter built on the historical overcoming of Jewish alienation. Between the two, the Israeli subject is structurally led to oscillate.

There was always, from within the socialist Zionism that dominated the Yishuv, a kind of self-correction tending to curb the “Canaanite” zeal that sought to forge a Hebrew citizen cut off from his Jewish past.

Also, “revolution” and “tradition,” to use Katznelson’s terms, do not form two poles opposite each other: rather, they are behaviors—detachment and recapitulative return—that have amalgamated into an ever-unstable equilibrium, the articulation of which varies according to circumstances. October 7 precipitated a crisis that Israeli national life, plagued by detachment, is clearly incapable of absorbing. This is precisely what the kina attests to. It is not a return, but a detour, a passage through the pole of Jewish experience, which has remained in a minor mode, potentially activatable. 

By placing October 7 in the continuity of Israel’s exilic destiny, the kina testifies to the disorientation suffered by Israeli society: even though hegemonic Zionism has generally been thought of as a break in Jewish history, it has never managed to completely impose itself. Kina indicates that the State of Israel is stumbling over a specifically Jewish limit to the process of modern nationalization, a limit that October 7 brings to the fore.It is not easy to predict the lasting effect of October 7 on Israeli Jewish society and, consequently, on the politics of the State of Israel. What can be said with certainty, however, is that it will have considerably fluidified the divided habitus of a predominantly secularized population. In search of the meaning of the event that shook the Zionist project to its foundations, Israelis are hesitant to face the abyss. In doing so, this event has unleashed memories of what Zionism procedes. The meaning of the word Zionism, the specifically Jewish meaning of the state project, has been reinforced. It is contained in the kina, as something that, in modern times, has emerged as an urgent necessity, namely the advent of a refuge state. And this rediscovered meaning is simultaneously made explicit for the Jews of the world who have kept their distance from this project, who, however far removed from tradition they may sometimes be, intuitively grasp what a kina means. The kina thus unifies the two parts of Israel—the citizens of the state that the Jews have given themselves, and the Jews of the world—in a single lament.

Shelter state, national home: this is precisely what the massacre of October 7 achieved, as the murderers penetrated the enclosed communities to break into homes, massacring entire families, children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children. The most intimate shelter was violated and, with it, the idea of home collapsed for the entire stunned Israeli public. Looking at the extent of the destruction inflicted on Gaza since the beginning of the Israeli offensive against Hamas, it appears that buildings were the most immediate and massive target of the Israeli response, as if its primary aim was to demonstrate the ability to render enemy territory uninhabitable in return.<footnoteI would like to thank Eyal Chowers, professor at Tel Aviv University, for bringing this point to my attention.</footnote> The excessiveness of the destructive response reveals what October 7 managed to touch in the deepest recesses of the Israeli ethos, since the construction of the national homeland and the family home merged in the Zionist idiolect under the banner of inviolable security. The fact that the term pogrom is appropriately used to describe the massacre is precisely because of the feeling of Heimatlosigkeit it instilled in the entire Israeli Jewish population, and in Jews in general.

 

 

Let us now return to the current relentlessness of the war, which borders on disoriented rage. It stems from the lack of balance between the two poles of the divided Israeli psyche: the return of the kina manifests the failure to overcome the Jewish condition, that is, its necessary persistence within realized Zionism; but this persistence became apparent at the moment when the Zionist realization itself was suspended. In a single day, October 7, confidence in the project faltered. The ground literally gave way beneath the Israelis’ feet, and with it, the home built on the settlement of the land (hityashvut). The massacre was followed by the mass evacuation of entire populations, first those near Gaza, then those settled along the threatening Lebanese border. Then, a nightmarish vision, like a shock wave, swept through Jewish-Israeli society: what if October 7 was the beginning of a general evacuation, with the last bastion being the departure lounge of a terminal at Ben Gurion Airport? “We are here to stay,” proclaimed the Israeli media, across the political spectrum, as if they needed to convince themselves.

The kina attests to the persistence of Jewish powerlessness in a state with considerable resources of power, available and mobilizable at any time.

Since then, every military initiative by the IDF aimed at loosening the stranglehold on the State of Israel, by going on the offensive on multiple fronts, has won the immediate support of a public convinced that the survival of the homeland depends on it. The Israeli kina therefore fits into a context where the catastrophe is prolonged in an offensive capable of overcoming the grief and anxiety expressed in lamentation. Since Israeli Jews now have a state capable of protecting their homeland, a state among states, including a still virtual Palestinian state, the Israeli kina is unique in that it cannot avoid incorporating the reality of the power of the Jewish state into its coordinates, whereas the traditional kina is a secretion of the complete powerlessness of the Jews. A lamentation on destruction, dispossession, and persecution, without recourse or relief, it must now acknowledge the ability of a state bearing the Jewish name to face adversity. This symmetry of power is a product of the Zionist revolution. It brings with it a responsibility and a reciprocity of perspectives that the historical consciousness underlying the traditional kina lacks.

It is here that Katznelson’s exhortation to strike an appropriate balance between revolution and tradition retains its full force. The kina of October 7 certainly reflects the unexpected emergence of Jewish history in the State of Israel, but within a framework that has provided Jewish citizens of the State of Israel with means that are, for them as Jews, revolutionary in the sense that they put them in a position to respond. The dispositions inherited from Jewish historical consciousness, when activated within a state framework, generate a tension that is difficult to manage. The kina attests to the persistence of the awareness of Jewish powerlessness in a state endowed with considerable resources of power, available and mobilizable at any moment. Modern Israeli kinot thus indicate that the adjusting of force remains an unresolved issue for the citizens of the State of Israel, torn as they are between a sense of powerlessness inherited from pre-state Jewish life (which was partially continued in a policy of restraint during the Yishuv era) and a disinhibition of force, the logic of which is currently manifesting itself in an implacable manner. This is why the challenge facing the Jewish state today, more than ever, is to find a balance between revolution and tradition, in order to harness its own power in a context that nevertheless pushes it to exercise that power excessively.

But how to measure what exceeds the necessary exercise of state violence is a question that cannot be answered definitively. At the very least, it must be assessed not on the basis of the absolute asymmetry inherent in tradition, but on the basis of a configuration in which a state for the Jews fits into an environment in which it coexists with state powers and entities with forces commensurate with its own. This calls for a reciprocity of perspectives, a requirement that the traditional configuration ignored by definition. This reciprocity must take into account the measure of force exercised and the measure of damage inflicted. Katznelson notes: “Many nations are enslaved, and many have even experienced exile […] Israel has managed to preserve from oblivion the day of its mourning, the date of its loss of freedom.” Collective lamentation is certainly a specifically Jewish form, but every people plunged into despair seeks the words to produce its own version. The traditional kina reflects the structural powerlessness of Jews abandoned in a hostile world. It does not accuse, it questions God’s silence, knowing that the exile whose end is awaited is the destiny of a people aware of its own mistakes. But the Palestinians, a people among nations, are not destined for exile. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry is the most striking expression of their visceral attachment to their land. This is why they immediately point to the agents of their dispossession, without feeling the need to go through an articulated political project. And with Hamas driven by political Islamism, the spirit of reconquest that is latent within the Palestinians has crossed a threshold, transforming itself into an active desire for extermination. As their catastrophic situation in Gaza shows every day, they are being hit hard by those they designate as their implacable enemies. 

If every people in distress is capable of finding the words to express its form of collective lamentation, the Palestinians are no exception. This is where a Palestinian version of lamentation that would reflect on itself, including its own mistakes, and that would express what the people want in a positive way without sounding like a vengeful threat, would certainly influence public opinion in Israel. The Israelis might be able to hear this, but only if they activate their Jewish hemisphere to perceive the catastrophe caused by their legitimate will to restore their deterrent force. The Israeli kina, as we know, has not been heard by the outside world, not even in Europe. But this deafness in no way justifies not hearing the Palestinian lament if it were to be expressed in terms that are audible and acceptable to the Israeli public. The unbalanced economy of their bipolar habitus, as revealed on October 7, would be rebalanced. This would result in the inhibition of the power of the State of Israel and, with it, in the long term, a transformation of Israeli public opinion in favor of territorial compromise. At least, that is what we can reasonably hope for.

---

Danny Trom