Watching, Waiting, and Worrying

January 5, 2006 - 11:41 AM by

Like a lot of my friends, I was watching the new Israeli television series “Emele” (Mommy) on Channel 2 television last night. It’s a high quality drama series about Effie, a 38-year-old Tel Aviv woman who accidentally gets pregnant and decides to become a single mother. The show was building up to the much-awaited scene where she bumps into the guy who is probably the father of the child, and he realizes she is pregnant.

Effie is crossing the street, and suddenly….the news breaks in. A special report.

Darn, I groan, why now?

But then I forget about the show and everything else. Prime Minister Sharon is getting helicoptered to the hospital. From there, it seems like a television rerun of his previous trip to the hospital, where he suffered what was described (spun?) as a small harmless stroke. There was comfort in the rerun…after all, the first showing had a happy ending where everything went back to calm familiarity.

And then it all changed. You could hear it in the tone of the newscasters, see it on their faces, read it in the Hebrew newspapers updating on the Internet. Something was very wrong. It is very wrong. And you can still see it, even in the faces of strangers as you walked down the street this morning.

Whether he lives or dies, we are all already in mourning. All of us — those who always like Sharon, those who never liked him, and the vast number of Israelis who once vilified him, but over the past several years have looked in wonderment as he embodied the definition of the word “leader.”

Yes, he had flaws, yes, there was scandal, he was far from perfect. But he was a leader. We had a leader. And we no longer do.

There are echoes of the feelings we had ten years ago, when we lost Yitzhak Rabin. Of course, we are not dealing with an assassination this time, with internal violence, with the same level of utter astonishment, with the same depth of national tragedy.

But something very similar is happening on an emotional level, and that is the sense of being in a pit of insecurity stemming from the fact that the country is not really being led at the moment. And we don’t know who our next real leader will be. If you want to get Freudian about it, we’re losing our father figure.

Left-wing or right-wing, even if you felt like men like Yitzhak Rabin or Ariel Sharon were wonderful — or if you felt that they were completely wrong, completely misled, overly violent or completely corrupt, you never doubted for a minute that their absolute top priority was the security and well-being of the State of Israel and its citizens. Every success and every mistake they made flowed from his deep determination to see this country survive, thrive, and succeed. With figures like these as Prime Minister, we felt that there was someone watching over us. And when they vanish suddenly, whether by the hand of an assassin or the fickle hand of fate, it leaves us devastated, deeply insecure and very worried about the future.

And so we worry, watch and wait, unable to let an hour pass without checking the television, radio and Internet. He’s still alive, and that’s great. But it doesn’t really change the fact that on the level that we need Ariel Sharon, we’ve already lost him. Those of us who believe in miracles are praying for one. And those of us who don’t believe in miracles wish that we did.

Tags: • Category: General 

Comments

One Comment on Watching, Waiting, and Worrying

  1. » Blog Archive » Ariel ben Devorah on Fri, Jun 20th 2008 5:40 AM

    2. [...] Harry points to an post summing up how Israeli’s are probably feeling now. One point I like that people keep stressing is that no matter what your politics were, no matter if you liked him or didn’t like him, on all accounts he did a tremendous job showing strength and just embodying a real leader. In the end, a leader has to make choices. Choices that sometimes people don’t agree with, but that’s why he is elected our leader, and good or bad, lead is what he has been doing. [...]

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