AAARGH
The Middle East:
1.
As a boy I used to play the rather menacing game of Snakes and
Ladders. The ladders, at least in the Israeli version, enabled
you to skip rows on your way to heaven. Snakes brought you down
to hell. At the top of the game board, just before you approached
heaven, there were two successive snakes: a big snake that plunged
you back to square one, and a small snake that tumbled you down
a few rows but left open the possibility of going up a ladder
to heaven.
In the complicated game of the Middle East, the ladders lead to
peace and the snakes to violence and war. And it is just not clear
whether the current Intifada is a big snake that brings us all
back to the square one of relations that existed between Jews
and Arabs in 1948, or a small snake that is a temporary setback
with an optional ladder to peace up the road. We lack the historical
perspective to judge. Yet it looks like a pretty big snake to
me.
Clouding our perspective, among other things, is a combination
of two quite different realities-on the one hand, the banal domestic
politics in Israel, and, on the other, a confrontation of historical
dimensions between Israel and the Palestinians. Before Ariel Sharon's
fatal visit to the Temple Mount, it was Benjamin Netanyahu who
was on Ehud Barak's and Sharon's minds, not Arafat. This visit,
on September 28, 2000, was the opening event of the current uprising
known as Intifada II. And it was the prospect of Netanyahu' s
return to Israeli politics rather than anything to do with the
Palestinians that explains why Sharon went there and why Barak
did not stop him.
When Barak arrived at Camp David last July to negotiate a peace
agreement, he and his government had just lost their majority
in parliament. He believed that if he could get an agreement with
Arafat, he could call elections and win. But emerging from Camp
David without an agreement made him politically vulnerable. All
the indications at the time were that Netanyahu, not Sharon, at
the head of a united right-wing coalition, would have a good chance
of beating him. The polls gave Barak an edge over Sharon, Netanyahu's
successor as the "temporary" head of the Likud Party.
Following his defeat by Barak in the 1999 elections, Netanyahu
had resigned from the Knesset and become, so he said, a "worried
citizen," awaiting his chance for a comeback.
Sharon's appeal to the party was limited. He looked old and tired,
and had little appeal for the more moderate voters in the "center."
Netanyahu's loyalists could barely wait for the glorious, vengeful
second coming of their leader. Sharon had every reason to fear
Netanyahu's return, knowing that Netanyahu could regain his hold
over the Likud Party quite easily, thereby robbing Sharon of his
last chance, at the age of seventy-two, of ever becoming the prime
minister of Israel. And so Sharon acted. In order to block Netanyahu's
return he decided to do what he could to take over for himself
Netanyahu's support from the hard-core right, in which the Jewish
settlers have a prominent part. This is like robbing a rival Republican
candidate of the support of the Christian Coalition-a source of
the kind of political enthusiasm that wins elections.
The Temple Mount was the perfect place for Sharon's move. It was
at the center of the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians:
Barak was accused of giving up, or being about to give up, on
Israeli sovereignty over the Mount. For Sharon to go there would
look like a protest against the weak Barak; he would be proving
his own courage by entering the Palestinians' lion's den. His
message, as he saw it, was clear: no one can out-right me. Should
the Palestinians protest-so much the better for his purposes.
But, from all the evidence, he did not expect the sequence of
events that followed his visit. I do not believe, as many Palestinians
seem to do, that Sharon went to the Mount precisely in order to
provoke them into doing what they eventually did. He had Netanyahu
on his mind, not the Palestinians.
But of course tension had built up around the Temple Mount (or
Haram al-Sharif, as it is called by Muslims). The place was charged
with highly inflammable religious and ideological octane. For
Barak to have allowed Sharon to go there, escorted by hundreds
of armed Israeli policemen, showed the worst possible political
judgment. Yet Barak did not try to stop him, because he, too,
had Netanyahu, not the Palestinians, on his mind. Barak understood
Sharon's act as aimed against Netanyahu, a threat common to them
both. He did not want to make it possible for Sharon to accuse
him of "preventing a Jew" from going to the top of the
holiest of Jewish holy places. And Barak at the time believed,
quite rationally, that he had a much better chance against Sharon
than against Netanyahu.
But then, how crucial was Sharon's visit for the events that followed?
To many outsiders I have talked to, especially in Europe, electing
Sharon as prime minister looked like appointing the village pyromaniac
to head its fire brigade. Like many Palestinians, these outsiders
believe that Sharon, by his exceedingly provocative visit, was
a prime mover in bringing about the outbreak of the second Intifada.
This is not the way most Israelis view it.
King Alexander of Greece died, in 1920, of blood poisoning after
a pet monkey bit him. His successor became involved in a bloody
war with the Turks in which a quarter of a million people died.
It was a monkey bite, wrote Churchill, that caused the death of
those 250,000 people. For most Israelis, Sharon's visit to the
Temple Mount was nothing more than a monkey's bite that led to
the violent death of hundreds of Palestinians and scores of Israeli
Jews. They think that the Palestinians, from Yasser Arafat down,
were determined to unleash violence, either in the belief that
through viole nce they could force a better deal from Israel,
or in the more extreme conviction that it is better and more honorable
to get whatever they could through violence than through diplomatic
negotiation-the way the Hizbollah forced Israel's unilateral withdrawal
from Lebanon. These Israelis think that while Sharon, by going
to the most sensitive spot in the conflict, may have acted recklessly
and thus played into the hands of Arafat, Intifada II would have
happened anyway, with or without his visit to the Temple Mount.
In the view of most Palestinians, Sharon's provocative visit,
escorted as he was by hundreds of armed policemen, was a decisive
factor in bringing about the chain of events that led to the so-called
al-Aqsa Intifada. To them it was proof that Israel, through its
military might, was determined to assert power over the holy sanctuary-the
Palestinians' most important religious and national symbol-and
to claim sovereignty over it. It was precisely this sovereignty
that the Palestinians challenged during the negotiations at Camp
David in July and precisely that sovereignty that Barak would
not entirely give up. The Palestinians believed that Sharon, with
the tacit blessing of Barak, wanted to provoke the Palestinians
on the Mount.
On the day following Sharon's visit, the Friday of prayer, the
protest by Palestinians on the Mount was met by a ferocious Israeli
police action, which led to four deaths. And this made everything
that followed almost inevitable. Virtually all the Palestinians
I have talked to believe that the protest was spontaneous, neither
ordered nor encouraged by Arafat and the Palestinian Authority.
According to their version of events, Sharon's visit to the Haram
al-Sharif was the "decisive factor," as the historians
call it, in bringing about the al-Aqsa Intifada. A good test of
whether an event is a decisive cause of another is if it enables
one to reliably predict what happens next. The Palestinians I
have talked to say that they could indeed have predicted ahead
of time that Sharon's presence at the Haram al-Sharif, escorted
by such a huge police force, would bring about just the sort of
violent events that took place.
I wonder. There seem to be some cracks in the Palestinian version.
For example, al-Ayam, the semi-official daily of the Palestinian
Authority, reported on December 6, 2000, that Imad al-Falouji,
the Palestinian minister of communications, said that the Palestinian
Authority began preparing to launch a new intifada from the moment
the negotiations at Camp David broke down. The instructions to
get ready for conflict, he says, came from Arafat himself. Al-Falouji's
retrospective statement doesn't decisively confirm the Israeli
version, as many who have cited this statement have claimed. Nor
does a statement by Ehud Olmert, the mayor of Jerusalem, confirm
the Palestinian version. Olmert, in opposing the candidacy of
Sharon for the premiership, asked rhetorically: Who in his sound
mind would vote for the person who started this bonfire-namely,
the Intifada?
What then is the truth about the relation between Sharon's visit
and Intifada II? To answer this we should go back to May 1996,
when Netanyahu, an opponent of the Oslo accords, assumed power.
By September of that year it became clear to the Palestinian leadership
that he was dragging his feet and not carrying out the agreement,
especially in his refusal to withdraw the Israeli army from various
agreed-upon locations in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian
leaders forcefully pointed this out to the Palestinian public,
which was already deeply embittered and frustrated by the Israeli
occupation.
But the Palestinians were also fed up with the corruption of the
Palestinian Authority-among other things, they saw, as one observer
put it, its cats licking up all the real estate milk. So bitterness
from above joined bitterness from below-though not quite the same
bitterness. And when in September 1996 Olmert, Jerusalem's mayor,
opened an ancient tunnel that borders on the Temple Mount, with
the blessing of Netanyahu but without informing the Islamic authorities
in the city, there was an extremely violent protest, which was
violently suppressed. About one hundred Palestinians and fifteen
Israelis were killed.
A similar pattern could be discerned in September 2000, following
Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount. In both cases there was unilateral
action by Israel in a religiously sensitive place, against the
background of political bitterness and a widespread sense that
a dead end had been reached by the leaders on both sides. Sharon's
visit came at a time of increasingly frustrated expectations and
harsh daily life among the Palestinians. It does not seem likely
that the day Sharon left the Temple Mount the top Palestinian
leaders gave orders for a new intifada, orders that were immediately
followed by young Palestinians who started throwing stones on
demand. It seems more likely that the bitterness among the top
leaders coincided with bitterness among the Palestinians in the
streets. Moreover, the active Palestinians pursuing the Intifada
mainly come from the one fifth of the population that is between
the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, a group with a very high
rate of unemployment. This fact, in itself, can explain much of
the unrest, with very little need to appeal to the planning and
guidance of the Palestinian Authority-two things the Authority
is not good at anyway.
But why did the incident of the tunnel end in a few days while
the end of the current Intifada is nowhere in sight? Part of the
explanation is that after the tunnel episode the Israeli army
drew the conclusion that it had not been adequately prepared,
and its leaders then decided to get ready for a future clash.
The measures it took-including extensive use of snipers for more
deadly attacks-led to its "success"; and that success
in the early days of the current Intifada became one of the reasons
why it has not ended and why it has now escalated to the point
where the Palestinians use mortars and the Israelis fire from
gunships.
To explain this, we must take account of the fact that the violent
clashes between Israeli forces and the Palestinian protesters
and police were much more extensive after Sharon's visit than
after the tunnel crisis. The numbers of Palestinians killed grew
daily: five on the first day, ten on the second, and then eight,
six, seven, six each day-as compared with two Israeli Jewish deaths
during the first week. The discrepancy in the number of wounded
is even more dramatic, and it created among the Palestinians a
strong sense that they were at a worse disadvantage than before.
The Israeli army was now much better prepared and protected; and
the ratio of casualties was clearly worse for the Palestinians
than it had been during the tunnel crisis. The pressure from Palestinian
leaders to respond more forcefully to Israel gradually changed
the nature of the uprising; what began as a youth crusade of stone-throwing
accompanied by sporadic shooting turned into armed ambushes and
semi-military operations, along with increasing numbers of car
bombings and suicide bombings by the Palestinians, whether planned
by the Palestinian Authority or by Hamas and other groups.
The Palestinians also wanted to extract all the sympathy they
could get from press and television, whether in the Middle East
or in the rest of the world. Their hope was, and still is, to
internationalize the conflict and bring about the intervention
of outside peacekeeping forces, as in Kosovo. But for that they
would have to be perceived as essentially passive victims who
protest by throwing stones and do not engage in savage killing.
The horrific picture of the father who could not protect his child
from being killed by Israeli snipers was precisely the image the
Palestinians wanted to convey. On the other hand, however, there
was the strong urge for revenge, and this resulted in the equally
horrific picture of a Palestinian mob lynching two Israelis soldiers
who ventured by mistake into the town of Ramallah. Paradoxically,
the extremely tough and effective state of preparedness of the
Israeli army is one of the reasons why the clashes did not stop
in a matter of days, as they had in the previous clashes of September
1996.
2.
I believe we are now seeing a full-fledged feud between the two
communities, with daily murderous assaults in revenge for the
previous day's injuries and insults. A feud is a backward-looking
conflict, more a sacrificial ritual than a political action looking
toward the future. Quite apart from the questions of how it all
started, and with what political rationale-if there was indeed
any rationale-what is taking place now is a feud more than it
is anything else. Feuds breed fatalism, and fatalism helps to
increase support in Israel for Sharon, for it takes the form of
a conviction that peace with the Palestinians can never be achieved.
If a cease-fire rather than peace is all that can be hoped for,
then for Sharon a cease-fire is nothing more than a period of
relief in a long and bloody feud.
Both Israelis and Palestinians would of course vehemently deny
that they are engaged in a feud. "The other side-maybe; but
not us." The Israeli argument is simple. A feud, they would
say, means a symmetrical cycle of violence, one attack avenging
another, but there is no symmetry here. If the Palestinians were
to stop the violence tomorrow, there is no question that Israel
would stop its violence at once. But if Israel stops the violence
tomorrow, there is no chance the Palestinians will stop theirs.
This I believe is largely true. But the argument neglects the
basic asymmetry between the Israelis and the Palestinians. As
things stand, a cease-fire would greatly favor Israel; it would
leave the Israelis with their heavily patrolled West Bank and
Gaza settlements and their punitive border controls; and it would
leave the Palestinians without a state. So as defenders of the
status quo ante, the Israelis would be more willing to stop the
feud than the Palestinians.
The Palestinians rest their case on what they believe are two
asymmetries: an asymmetry in power, in favor of Israel, and an
asymmetry in moral standing, in the Palestinians' favor. They
stand for justice, Israel for injustice. As they see it, they
are engaged in fighting an occupation, not in a feud. Calling
their resistance to occupation a feud, they would say, simply
undermines their struggle by imposing on them the stereotype of
tribal desert primitives launched on a futile course of endless
blood revenge.
To this, there seem to me two answers. First, to call the conflict
a feud is to implicate both sides. Secondly, one could wish the
feud was of the kind fought by desert tribes. Real desert feuds,
like those among the Bedouins, are not part of a culture of victimhood.
They involve no self-pity or self-righteousness; they do not sentimentally
depict one's own side as the sacrificial lamb, an epitome of innocence.
Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the spiritual leader of the Hamas movement,
embodies this samurai-like attitude. He is a bitter enemy of Israel,
but not a sentimentalist. He is an exception, though. By and large
the two communities are saturated with the culture of victimhood.
There is indeed a great disparity in power between Israel and
the Palestinians. Israel controls 20,700 square kilometers of
its own country plus some 3,400 of the West Bank, including its
many settlements, over which it has full control (so-called Area
C, in the Oslo-accord lingo). To this must be added 1,400 square
kilometers of "Area B"-a region of Arab towns and villages
that Israel controls militarily but not administratively.
The Palestinians have full control over 1,500 square kilometers
(Area A), including Gaza and the six largest West Bank cities,
among them Nablus and Bethlehem. They have jurisdiction over 2.9
million people, Israel more than 6 million. As of last year the
average personal income of an Israeli was $17,000, as compared
with $1,350 per Palestinian. Israel's GNP is $100 billion, the
Palestinians' $4 billion. Almost half of the latter comes from
the outside, either earned by Palestinians who work in Israel
or remitted by Israel from taxes collected from Palestinian workers,
or donated from abroad. Israel has a regular, powerfully equipped
military force of 195,000 (including border police); the Palestinians
have a force of 35,000, equipped mostly with rifles. As of April
3, according to the Associated Press, 375 Palestinians had been
killed since In-tifada II began, as compared with 64 Israeli Jews.*
These figures notwithstanding, both Barak and Sharon believe that
while Israel would show great strength in a full-fledged war,
it will eventually become weak in a low-intensity "war of
attrition." Israel so far has won all of its all-out wars
and lost all of its wars of attrition, such as the war of attrition
with Egypt between 1968 and 1970, and most recently the conflict
in southern Lebanon. The usual explanation is that Israel has
become more and more sensitive to casualties, less and less a
society in which the population stands ready to be recruited for
a long-term guard duty.
The dread of a prolonged war of attrition is one of the reasons
Israel's military leaders are behaving very harshly toward the
Palestinian population; they use extensive measures of collective
punishment through a policy of border and road closings and sieges
of Arab towns and villages. In applying these repressive measures
Israel systematically violates a great many human rights. The
reliable Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied
Territories, B'Tselem, thoroughly documents human rights violations,
including many cases of mistreatment of civilians, both in and
out of prison. The Palestinians claim that their stone-throwing
and other tactics are weapons of the weak. While they wish they
could swap their stones and rifles for Israel's tanks, they regard
their struggle as a political struggle against an occupation,
and not as a senseless feud.
3.
If there is one thing that gets on the Palestinians' nerves, it's
the talk about Barak's "generous offer" at Camp David.
Palestinians-all Palestinians-regard this expression as a deep
contradiction. Just why they do needs explaining.
Palestinians view the Palestine that existed during British rule
between 1918 and 1948 as theirs-100 percent theirs, from the Mediterranean
Sea to the Jordan River. They see themselves as the indigenous
population of this region and hence the natural owners of the
entire land of Palestine. Any part of the land that they yield
as part of an agreement is, for them, a huge concession. Recognizing
the State of Israel as defined by its 1967 borders-the so-called
green line-and thus yielding some 77 percent of British mandate
Palestine is to them by itself a colossal concession, a painful
historical compromise. By recognizing the Israel within the green
line they give up their claim to redress what they see as the
wrong done to them by the establishment of the State of Israel
in 1948. If they accept any deal that recognizes Israel they will
have succeeded at most in redressing the wrong done to them in
1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza. Thus to ask
them to compromise further after what they already regard as a
huge compromise is, as they see it, a historical outrage. To call
any such compromise "a generous offer" is to them sheer
blasphemy.
The Israeli perception is of course diametrically opposite. And
by "the Israeli perception" I do not refer to the idea
of "Greater Israel," according to which the entire biblical
land of Israel belongs to the Jews, who are the historical indigenous
population that was forced out of the land but never gave it up.
What I mean by the Israeli perception is something very prosaic
and unbiblical. Following the two wars that were forced on Israel,
in 1948 and 1967, Israel conquered and held on to the entire land
from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. So the Israelis say
that any territory we yield to Palestinians is, to us, a concession.
And if Barak was willing to offer them almost all of the territories
occupied since 1967-an offer that no previous Israeli leader was
willing to entertain, let alone to make-it is entirely apt to
see this as a generous offer.
Palestinians who are close to the Palestinian delegation at Camp
David deny that Barak made a pragmatic, generous offer. "What
is so generous," they ask, "in Barak's offering us 87
percent of the West Bank, when 80 percent of the settlers are
left where they are, while 100,000 Palestinians are annexed to
Israel along with them? What is so generous in demanding to keep
control of 20 percent of the Jordan Valley, and what is so great
about Barak's bizarre suggestion that in the Haram al-Sharif Palestinians
shall have control above the ground and Israel underneath? And
when you add to this Barak's mean-spirited, patronizing, and arrogant
behavior toward Arafat and the Palestinian delegation at Camp
David, then you see that generosity
With regard to Barak's initial bargaining position, all this may
or may not be true. But even if it is true, and Barak is not the
generous person his propaganda would have us believe that he is,
it is irrelevant. What is relevant are Clinton's proposals to
"bridge" the differences between the two sides; and
these-unlike Barak's proposals, generous or otherwise-are all
in the open. And whatever else Barak had in mind, at least we
know that he said "yes" to Clinton's proposals; a complicated
yes, but a yes nevertheless. As for Arafat, his answer to Clinton's
proposals was a thirty-five-page document full of reservations.
However sensible these reservations were, his answer was "no."
What was the gist of Clinton's proposals? A Palestinian state
is to be established on some 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank
and all of the Gaza Strip. Eighty percent of the Israeli settlers
currently living in the West Bank will be concentrated in settlements
placed within the 4 to 6 percent of the land that Israel wishes
to annex, on condition that these settlements do not destroy the
territorial continuity of the Palestinian state. For the territories
that Israel will annex, Israel will have to compensate the Palestinian
state by giving up between 1 and 3 percent of its own territory
elsewhere. As for Jerusalem, neighborhoods where Arabs live will
belong to the Palestinian state, and neighborhoods where Jews
live will belong to Israel. This arrangement is to apply to the
Old City as well. The Haram al-Sharif will be under Palestinian
sovereignty, while the Wailing Wall as well as other places that
are holy to the Jews will be under Israeli sovereignty. The final
agreement will state clearly that it brings to an end the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict and that no further claims will be recognized.
What then of the problem of the more than three million Palestinian
refugees, of whom more than 150,000 are in camps in Lebanon? In
principle, apart from Israel paying the refugees compensation
for lost lands, there are five possible, and overlapping, ways
to solve the problem. The refugees can live (1) within the Palestinian
state based in territories now held by the Palestinians; (2) in
the territories that Israel will hand over to the Palestinian
state; (3) in the Arab countries now holding the refugees; (4)
in various third countries; and (5) in Israel. Palestinians worried
that were they to accept Clinton's proposals this would undermine
the international legal basis for their claims on behalf of the
refugees, most especially UN resolution 194 of December 1948.
Resolution 194 is an article of faith in the Palestinian system
of beliefs. It says that the refugees "wishing to return
to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be
permitted to do so." Israelis have very little trust in the
refugees' willingness to live in peace with them. They believe
that the refugees, especially those who have lived all these years
in refugee camps, are bitter enemies of Israel and that they have
raised their children on bitter hatred toward Israel.
Resolution 194 does not specify a right of return-but this is
how the Palestinians understand it. The current Intifada brought
the issue of the Palestinian right of return to the center of
the conflict. Still, it is not just this issue that stopped the
Palestinians from accepting Clinton's proposals. The end of the
conflict is in some sense the hardest thing for them to accept.
It means giving up on one defining feature of Palestinian identity-that
Palestinians shall never surrender the hope of putting right Israel's
injustices of the past. (This is one reason that compensation
for lost lands, which Israeli officials have discussed with the
Palestinians, has not been accepted as an adequate response to
Palestinian claims, although in the long run compensation may
still hold the best prospect for a solution.)The end of the conflict
is the end of hope or at least of one great hope.
4.
To those who know him, Barak credits himself with being a great
experimenter. In the laboratory of Camp David he believes he discovered
and exposed the irreconcilable Palestinian will to keep the conflict
with Israel going. The left wing in Israel, Barak thinks, does
not forgive him for having exposed the hollowness of their faith
that there is an available partner for peace and that the partner
is Arafat. He also believes that the right wing does not forgive
him for having exposed the hollowness of their faith that "peace
with security" can be achieved while half of the West Bank
stays in Israel's hands.
For revealing these truths, Barak believes, he was punished in
the recent election: the right voted against him, along with the
opportunistic Russian Jewish immigrants, and the left did not
campaign for him wholeheartedly (as it did in 1999) and voted
for him in reduced numbers. And this, he believes, is perhaps
as it should be for someone who makes a people face the reality
principle and give up the pleasure principle. Still, in the name
of the reality principle I would note that Barak lost neither
the right (they were against him anyway) nor the left, but the
center, which had brought him to power in the first place. The
center-which consists of a large part of the Labor Party, as well
as the Center Party, the Shinui (Change) Party, and the Russians-cannot
forgive Barak for having offered concessions and then getting
not a deal but a grim war of attrition instead.
The very idea of Barak conducting an experiment is bad news. The
Palestinian will is not an entity in particle physics, about which
Barak could discover that it has no positive spin toward peace.
The Palestinians, like the rest of the world, have many conflicting
aims. They want a final agreement-they have lost hope that anything
good will come from an interim agreement with Israel. But they
also want to leave the conflict open-ended. They want to get the
Israeli occupation off their backs as quickly as possible, fearing
that the ever-expanding settlements will leave them with no land
to spare. But at the same time they prolong the occupation by
insisting on the refugees' right of return, fully realizing that
there is no realistic hope that Israel will agree to the return
of any substantial number of them. For Barak or anyone else to
set up an experiment in order to discover what is the Palestinians'
"real, true will" makes no sense. In different times
they give different weights to their conflicting desires, as all
of us do. And as happens to all of us in times of crisis, ideological
commitments-like the right of return-have the upper hand.
I have no doubt that Barak wanted to conclude a peace agreement
with the Palestinians. He was, in my view, basically generous
in the content of his proposals but mean in the style in which
he made them. Yet I also believe that from the time he assumed
power he did almost everything that was possible, and tried some
things that were impossible, to bring out the worst in the Palestinians,
in whom he desperately needed to bring out the best. After the
administration of Netanyahu, who resisted the Oslo accords, many
Israelis expected that Barak would implement what the accords
agreed on. He was expected to be attentive to the Palestinians'
urgently expressed needs, especially with regard to the prisoners
who were left in Israeli jails after the agreement. He did nothing
of the sort; and he did nothing to build the minimal trust needed
to get "the peace process" going. Barak failed to get
in touch with the Palestinian leaders in order to find out for
himself what particularly concerns them and where they stand on
the details of a settlement. Instead he started out by completely
ignoring those leaders, refusing to meet with Arafat and turning
to negotiations with the Syrians instead. Only when the negotiations
with Syria failed did he start addressing the Palestinians, almost
by default.
During Barak's year and a half in office, there were more housing
starts in the settlements than during Netanyahu's administration;
this, to put it mildly, did not help to establish trust. And in
my opinion, one of Barak's worst blunders, at least for its effects
on peace negotiations with the Palestinians, was his decision
to order a unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, under Hizbollah
fire. True, Israel should not have been in Lebanon to begin with.
But withdrawal under fire, without an agreement, made many Palestinians
(not Arafat, however) believe that they could get rid of the Israeli
occupation in much the same way, i.e., by force and without having
to sign what they regard as a humiliating agreement. The unilateral
withdrawal created among the Palestinians a climate of defiance
rather than a mood for concessions.
Moreover, Barak alienated the Israeli Arabs, 95 percent of whom
had originally voted for him. In doing so, he lost the good will
of a population that in recent years has been in constant touch
with their brethren in the Occupied Territories. Barak refused
to do anything for them, believing that in order to persuade the
Israeli Jews of the need for an agreement, he could not be perceived
as an "Arab lover." All of this ended tragically last
October, when twelve Israeli Arab citizens were killed by the
Israeli police during the riots that started after Sharon's visit
to the Haram al-Sharif.
As to Arafat, his turning down the Clinton "bridge"
proposals may one day be judged by historians as a mistake comparable
to the Palestinians' fatal mistake in rejecting the UN partition
plan of 1947. When, at Camp David and afterward, Arafat concentrated
on the issues of Jerusalem and especially on total sovereignty
over the Holy Sanctuary, I interpreted this as a double-edged
sword. If he gained sovereignty, this would count as a tremendous
symbolic victory (both national and religious) and he would be
in a much stronger position to compromise on the right of return.
And if he did not gain sovereignty, he could use his failure to
do so to try to unite the entire Islamic world-one fifth of the
human race-against Israel. He could, that is, try to turn a national
conflict into a religious holy war-Israel's real dread. Notwithstanding
all the bad blood between Barak and Arafat, I believe that Barak
made a serious mistake at Camp David in not compromising on sovereignty
over the Temple Mount. It could have been his best chance at reaching
an agreement. As it turned out, Barak left Israel in shambles:
politically, economically, and ideologically. Sharon's national
unity government consists of the two big parties: Labor and Likud.
Whatever their histories, they have become ideologically indistinguishable.
Even if we judge the Labor Party by its political rhetoric, one
cannot honestly say that it is more moderate. Nor does either
of the two parties have a coherent political agenda.
At the advanced ages of seventy-three and seventy-eight respectively,
Sharon and Shimon Peres now run Israel. It is hard to tell which
is the "moderate." At some stage they may try to revive
the negotiations with Syria, but at the moment they have on their
hands, not politics, but a feud, however vehemently each side
may deny this. It has now led to Israeli bombing of Syrian targets
in Lebanon and Palestinian Authority targets in Gaza, and if it
goes on, I sense that the two Israeli leaders may try to get rid
of Arafat. They might warn him first by attacking his lieutenants.
When five members of Arafat's security guard were taken prisoner
by Israeli forces on the West Bank at the beginning of April,
this seemed to prefigure further attacks on the center of Palestinian
power. Sharon and Peres may want to destroy Arafat's regime, reasoning
that better the devil you don't know than the one you do. That
is the kind of action that suggests itself when you don 't deal
with politics but pursue an endless cycle of revenge.
--April 18, 2000
* The Associated Press statistics should be compared with those
of Reuters, which estimates "at least 367" deaths of
Palestinians and 70 deaths of Israeli Jews as of April 2, 2001,
and those of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which refers
to 411 Palestinian deaths. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society
also states that 12,616 Palestinians had been injured as of April
2 in the West Bank and Gaza. The Israeli Defense Force states
that as of March 27, 837 Israeli Jews, including both civilians
and members of the security forces, had been injured both in the
Occupied Territories and within the green line.
+++++++++++++++++++++
New York Review of Books, May 17, 2001.
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