Is this the moment when everything changes?

Hidden threat under cups of coffee: The liveliness and enjoyment of crowds in Tel Aviv’s Neve Tzedek neighbourhood covers a sinister challenge for Israel – will it be irrevocably stained as Israeli soldiers are instructed to fire at unarmed protesters on the Gaza border?

IN EVERY nation, certain events are identified by historians looking back as tipping points which defined its character and soul. Israel’s wars are markers – the War of Independence, Six Day War and Yom Kippur War, which gave Israelis and Jews the feeling they weren’t doomed to forever be “strangers” in other peoples’ countries. Crucial moments in the Jewish soul.

It doesn’t have to be war in the conventional sense; it could reside under the surface of everyday reality, as it does on this seventieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel.

Anyone visiting Neve Tzedek, the artsy area in South Tel Aviv last Friday night would have seen the incredible buzz of people, young and old of all cultures and languages confidently enjoying themselves at cafes and strolling the streets, and might have been inspired at how far Israel has come and the confidence of its citizens. Israeli flags hung on almost every street pole, from every window, and on cars’ aerials. At the crowded shuk’s’ entrance, a man sang popular 1960s songs amidst the flags.

But if you went into a café and listened to conversations, you would hear sprinkled among them, the ‘war’ going on just across the border a few kilometres away over the Green Line, in the West Bank and Gaza, beyond the privileged Tel Aviv ‘bubble’. There is also talk of a new force in politics, not just to do with the shaky coalition Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is holding together amidst scandals, but about a potent recent incident: The morality of Israeli soldiers shooting and killing unarmed protesters on March 30, at the Gaza border during protests there, which started a train of events Israel seems unable to stop.

That event may be what historians will identify as the point when even ardent believers in the justice of the Jews’ statehood could not excuse its actions – where in some respects, Israel lost something in its soul.

Such markers in a nation’s character don’t have to be bloody. In the United States, the Rosa Parks incident, where a black woman refused to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus in 1955, triggered a wave of protests that reverberated throughout the United States. The flurry which the incident generated became a symbol of the indignities black people were constantly subjected to, affecting the soul of the nation and its sense of morality. She is internationally recognised as the “mother of the modern day civil rights movement” in America. Everyone knows the name Rosa Parks.

Other tipping points affecting inner, personal feelings in the United States include the terrorist attacks of September 11 in 2001, which future historians might one day interpret as the beginning of the third world war.

For the new South Africa, the 2012 killings at Marikana will probably qualify as the tipping point for negative perceptions about the ANC, as the 1960 Sharpeville massacre was for the apartheid government.

Sometimes tipping points are contradictory. South Africa’s difficult situation today regarding rising racial tensions, inequality and poverty, suggests that rather than being the dawn of a new, bright era, the much heralded 1994 democratic elections might be seen by future historians as the beginning of a new decline of SA into a corrupt, bankrupt country. What a tragedy, after the bitter struggle that was waged here.

Another glance at the buzz in Neve Tzedek reveals that behind the façade of joy and laughter, lies the uncomfortable knowledge that something much more difficult and complex is playing out. How to recapture the moral high ground after incidents such as the shooting of unarmed civilians is no less of a struggle for Israel than winning a war.

GEOFF SIFRIN is a journalist in Johannesburg, South Africa, and former Editor of the SA Jewish Report. Email:  geoffs@icon.co.za