Dedicated readers of The Monkey Cage may have noticed that I have not posted anything in the past week or so. Rumors aside, this was not actually due to the fact that I was recovering from the “The Week Opinion Awards”:http://theweek.com/article/index/215054/the-8th-annual-opinion-awards after party, but rather because I had my first opportunity to travel in Israel after presenting a paper at a “conference”:http://www.ef.huji.ac.il/post%20soviet%20space%20Conference.pdf at the “European Forum of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem”:http://www.ef.huji.ac.il/events/conferences.shtml. In the spirit of “De Toqueville”:http://www.amazon.com/Democracy-America-Penguin-Classics-Tocqueville/dp/0140447601/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1306337591&sr=1-1, I thought that I would share a few observations from my travels.
* I have never visited a country before where you could travel such short distances and see the physical geography change so much. This starts in the Old City in Jerusalem, where the Muslim Quarter looks completely different from the Jewish Quarter, but then continues on through different neighborhoods of Jerusalem and into the rest of the country. You can drive less than an hour in one direction, and you are in a desert. You go another direction for an hour, and you are in a Mediterranean beach front. Another direction for two hours takes you into mountainous terrain.
* You can also get a real sense of just how small the country the really is. It is really difficult to drive for more than a couple of hours in any direction without bumping up against a border or a sea.
* “Solving” the question of Jerusalem is going to be very difficult physically. Neighborhoods are not neatly arranged into Jewish sections in one area and Arab sections in another. You can stand at Hebrew University and look out and see a Jewish neighborhood in the distance with an Arab neighborhood in the same direction only much closer.
* I have no idea how you ultimately deal with the question of the “Temple Mount”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount, which contains one of Islam’s holiest shrines (the “Dome of the Rock”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Mount) on Judaism’s holiest land. The only thing I could think of was to turn the whole area over to the same “Swiss Guards”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Guard who watch the Vatican, but somehow I doubt anyone is going to like that. But it made me think that Obama was on to something by trying to get negotiations going on topics other than the final status of Jerusalem for now.
* Based simply on conversation with Israelis, my sense is that the biggest long term story in Israelis politics is going to be a demographic one. Whereas demographic trends in the United States will most likely broadly favor the left (e.g., increasing numbers of Hispanics, a declining share of whites as a proportion of the total population), in Israel demographic trends favor the right. Namely, ultra orthodox Jews are having many more children than secular Jews. This in turn is going to continue to pull Israeli politics farther to the right in the future.
* Jerusalem and Tel Aviv feel like they could be on different planets. Tel Aviv reminded me of Barcelona with its cafes, food, and beaches; Jerusalem reminded me of, well, nothing else really. Which brings me to a question: is there any other city in the world like Jerusalem that is home to so many different Holy Sites for so many _different_ religions? If you’ve never been there before, it really is something to see.