Twenty years after Sharon trapped Arafat in Beirut in the Lebanon War of 1982, and after Arafat slipped away to Tunis—striding along the dock at Beirut, on the crosshairs of an Israeli sniper forbidden to shoot him—the two are facing off again.
The sordid reality that the two of them have created for their public is in their own image. Each of them has “succeeded”—each in his own way, each in accordance with the influence he has wielded over the years—in fanning the flames of violence, hatred, and despair among their peoples. Their opponents say that they have no policy and no vision beyond the will to survive. But look how today’s situation is the inevitable outcome of their chosen paths, their deeds, their aspirations, and how much the present state of affairs reflects their warlike, suspicious, and aggressive view of the world. For them it confirms, in a hermetic, circular way, just how right they have always been.
Sharon and Arafat have together, in a collaboration that makes the skin crawl, complicated politics to the point that it has turned to war, have spread despondency of any possibility of dialogue, have brought the situation to such an extreme that their people will be seduced into believing that there really is no choice but to fight against and kill each other.
Now each of them plays the role he has perfected over decades. One is the superwarrior, a sort of gigantic military relic of the new Jewish history. The other is the persecuted, isolated, besieged martyr, wallowing in the desolation from which he knows how to draw a startling strength and forcefulness.
Both of them will fail, apparently, just as they have failed in the past. Sharon won’t succeed in eradicating terrorism. Even if he captures all its planners and strategists, even if he confiscates all the large quantities of weapons that the Palestinians now possess, he will not succeed in excising from the hearts of the Palestinians the impetus to act violently. That is their despair, their sense of humiliation, and their hatred of Israel. His measures will only enhance all these and encourage further waves of terror that will make Israel’s position even more precarious.
Arafat will not, apparently, get what he wants, which is to draw the Arab countries into the conflict. They fear, no less than Israel, the internal unrest that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict causes, and fear even more the Islamic religious extremism that Arafat encourages and that is liable to harm them from within. The world will, apparently, continue to abandon Israel and the Palestinians to kill each other.
More seriously, Arafat’s gambits, the encouragement he gives to the suicide bombers, his grotesque hope, as he recently stated, to himself be “a suicide bomber, a martyr, on the way to Jerusalem,” only pushes the establishment of a Palestinian state further into the distance.
Evil things are happening to both peoples. Fear causes no less damage to the soul than explosives cause to the body. Israeli society is becoming more violent, aggressive, and racist, and less democratic. Palestinian society is undergoing an even more dangerous process. A society that becomes accustomed to sending its young men and women on suicide operations aimed at murdering innocent civilians, a society that encourages such actions and glorifies their perpetrators, will pay a price in the future. Its coin will be their attitude toward life itself, life as an inalienable sacred value. It will also be paid in a more practical way—the minute the possibility of such a horrifying action is formulating in the consciousness of a nation, it will not disappear. It will rear its head again in the people’s internal affairs. It is not at all surprising that moderate Palestinians are no less alarmed by the suicide bombers than Israelis are. They know the bitter truth—the weapon of suicide, which has proved itself so effective against the Israelis, is liable to be used against them as well, when the Palestinians have a state and commence their internecine struggles over the character and image of that state.
That’s the way things are right now. It’s a situation of despair and disintegration. How can we get out of it? Palestinian terrorist attacks will, unfortunately, continue for a long time to come. But if there is also, concurrently, a move toward peace, a process of concessions, of ending the occupation, of conciliation and recognition of the suffering incurred by the other side, there is room for the hope that the Palestinian public’s support for terror will decline, and the Israeli public’s confidence in a peaceful resolution of the conflict will grow. Is there a chance that this might happen? Every thinking person realizes that Arafat and Sharon are incapable of creating this opportunity. What remains? To live through this nightmare to its end, to go from funeral to funeral, and to try to survive each passing moment. Thoughts of peace, of mutual understanding, of coexistence between the two peoples now sound like the last signals of life from a ship that has already sunk.
This War Cannot Be Won
June 2002
When the bus exploded in the morning rush hour in southern Jerusalem, the sound was heard miles away in other parts of the city. Most of the victims were residents of the neighborhood of Gilo, often targeted by Palestinian snipers. A few of the dead and the wounded were Arab Israeli college students. Arafat made a statement to the Palestinian people the next day, demanding a halt to attacks on Israeli civilians, because such attacks give the Israeli government “the excuse to reoccupy our land.”
Another victory for madness: A moment before President Bush was to make a speech declaring his support for a Palestinian state, a Palestinian suicide-murderer of the Hamas faction blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem. He killed nineteen civilians and wounded seventy, including children on their way to school. Black plastic body bags were laid out in a row on the sidewalk, one next to the other.
This row of bodies also postponed significantly the Palestinians’ chances of attaining their own state. Despite this, according to a survey published yesterday in the Palestinian Authority, 80 percent of the Palestinian public supports continued terrorist attacks against Israelis. If that’s the case, we must conclude that the Palestinians are now doing everything necessary to ensure that they will never have their own country.
At the same time, the Israeli government is being pushed into a corner. Shackled to its aggressive, mechanical, one-dimensional way of thinking, it immediately declares an escalated response. From now on, the government declares, the Israeli Army will reoccupy areas of the Palestinian Authority following every attack on Israel. Only this time, the army will not withdraw quickly—it “will instead remain in them until terrorism ceases.”
Since terrorism won’t come to a halt, certainly not as long as there is no political settlement granting the Palestinians an independent state, it is clear that the Israeli government has decided to reconquer the entire area of the Palestinian Authority, in order to ensure that terrorism will continue.
Why is Hamas so eager to harm the interests of the Palestinians as a whole? Because Hamas fears the reforms that Arafat will soon be compelled to institute, reforms that will restrict Hamas’s terrorist activities. Hamas is also concerned that the positions of Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia on the need to fight terrorism are drawing closer to those of the United States and Israel. Hamas’s immediate goal is to induce Israel to attack the Palestinian Authority, perhaps even reoccupy its territories, to force these relatively moderate Arab states to retreat into their previous extremist positions.
So why is the Israeli government—under Ariel Sharon’s leadership—playing into Hamas’s hands?
Because it doesn’t believe that it has anyone to negotiate with on the Palestinian side, and because it includes factions that oppose any real compromise. But mostly because the Israeli government is at a loss, confused, and desperate.
Israel is so much at a loss that yesterday a senior cabinet minister proposed that Israel, instead of surrounding itself with a protective wall and fences, surround every Palestinian village and city with fences, to isolate them one from the other.
Israel is so discouraged today that the idea of expelling the Palestinians from the areas of the Palestinian Authority, and expelling Israel’s million Palestinian cit
izens, is gaining support and legitimacy in public opinion and at the cabinet table. Yesterday, at the entrance to Jerusalem, demonstrators who support such a transfer (the euphemistic term for expulsion and deportation) carried this banner: TRANSFER: THE ONLY WAY TO PEACE!
In other words, not dialogue and compromise and mutual recognition and a consensual border and a cessation of terrorism as the way to peace. No, the way to the much-desired peace and tranquillity is to expel a few million more Palestinians!
One gets dizzy listening to such unfounded claims, from seeing the horrors that come hard on the heels of the last, creating a surrealistic continuum in which a madman’s logic rules. If we follow each side’s line of thinking a little further, we’ll easily perceive how we will soon be living—in an endless jumble of murders and expulsions and reoccupations and strategic mega-attacks, perhaps even nuclear terrorism, the destabilization of the moderate Arab states, perhaps even an all-out war whose outcome no one can predict. It feels like a nightmare, and maybe only a historian gazing back from the future will be able to explain the hypnotic effect of the nightmare we are striding into with eyes wide open. Both sides are doing everything in their power, each in its turn, to ensure that it all comes true.
Three weeks ago I went to London to participate in a unique encounter organized by the British newspaper The Guardian. Israeli and Palestinian supporters of peace spent three days conferring with the leaders of the formerly warring factions of Northern Ireland. The Irish, Catholics and Protestants who had been murdering each other just four years ago, sat next to each other and spoke the language of peace, and expressed their grave concern that the conflict might break out again. We, the Israelis and Palestinians, listened to them, with much yearning and envy. At one point, an Israeli asked, How did you do it? How did you manage to extricate yourselves from hundreds of years of violence and hatred and put yourselves on the track of dialogue? When did you understand that there was no other way?
David Ervine, a Protestant leader who had been caught in the past with a live bomb in his hands, looked at Martin McGuinness, a Catholic leader, a man whom he had fought, who had been his bitter enemy. “There was a moment,” he said, “when I simply understood that this war cannot be won.” McGuinness nodded.
A sigh of relief passed among us, Israelis and Palestinians, relief at having become aware of a conclusion that was so simple, at having heard such a clear, longed-for formulation. But then we grew somber again. We made a quick computation: In Northern Ireland, it took eight hundred years to reach this obvious conclusion. Does that mean that we have another seven hundred years to wait?
(I meant to end the article here. But as I type this, the radio is announcing a warning that a terrorist with an explosive belt is now roaming the streets of Jerusalem. And again the stomach knots up, the thoughts race. You quickly scan your mental map of those dear to you—where is each of them at this particular moment? You visualize a huge roulette wheel, turning slowly, slowly, and then coming to a halt.)
Bad Fences Make Bad Neighbors
July 2002
Grassroots organizers and politicians from different sides of the political spectrum gained popular support in their campaign for unilateral withdrawal and the construction of a fence separating Israel from the Palestinian Authority’s territory. The proposed unilateral disengagement system would include fences, walls, electromagnetic sensors, guard towers, airborne surveillance, security patrols, and well-guarded checkpoints. It would not be considered a border. According to its supporters, the fence would serve as a barrier preventing terrorists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from entering Israel. It would remain in place until a negotiated peace could be achieved with the Palestinians. Yet, even among its proponents, there was disagreement as to where the fence would run and how many Israeli settlements would be protected on its Israeli side. Ariel Sharon’s government finally approved the route of the first no kilometers of the fence in August 2002, but stipulated that none of the Israeli settlements outside it would be evacuated. As of December, only one kilometer of the planned fence has been built.
“Good fences make good neighbors,” wrote the poet Robert Frost. Israel and Palestine are certainly not good neighbors, and there is certainly an urgent need, both in practice and in principle, to establish a border between them. I mean a border with sophisticated defensive and barrier devices, open only at border crossings established by mutual consent. Such a border would protect them from each other, would help stabilize their relations and, especially, would require them to internalize, once and for all, the concept of a border. It’s a vague, elusive, and problematic concept for both of them, since they’ve lived for the last hundred years without clear boundaries, with constant invasion, each within, on top of, over, and under the other.
Yet, in my opinion, it would be very dangerous to establish such a border fence right now, unilaterally, without a peace agreement of any kind, while the principal points are still in heated dispute, before the two sides have truly exhausted all the possibilities for dialogue between them. The establishment of a fence now, even if it reduces the number of terrorist attacks for a certain period, is another precipitate action aimed at giving the Israeli public a temporary illusion of security. Its main effect would be to supply Israelis with a counterfeit replacement for a peace process which requires difficult and painful compromises.
There may well come a time—after both sides have attempted another serious and sincere move toward peace—when Israel will reach the conclusion that there really is no chance of peace in this generation. In such a case, Israel will have to withdraw from the occupied territories, evacuate almost all the settlements, shut itself behind a thick wall, and prepare for an ongoing battle.
From my conversations with Palestinian leaders, however, I am convinced there still is a chance for peace. And as long as there is a chance, even a slight one, Israel may not make its choice of last resort.
Most Israelis disagree. They think we’ve already reached that point. “There’s no one to make an agreement with!” they say. “Even Shimon Peres and the leaders of the left say that they are no longer willing to talk with Arafat, and in the meantime, Israel must defend itself against terror somehow!”
But even if we assume that Arafat is not a partner (by the way, it certainly hasn’t been proven that Sharon is a willing partner either), we need to examine the practical implications of the establishment of a barrier fence without an agreement. They are grave enough to make such a unilateral move unwise, unless there really is no other alternative.
It is clear to everyone that such a fence would not prevent, for example, the Palestinians firing rockets and mortars from their territory into Israel. If Israel closed itself off behind a fence, the Palestinians would be able to invite in “aid” from foreign armies—from Iran, for example, or Hezbollah. The Israeli Army would have to operate beyond the fence, in order to defend isolated Israeli settlements that remained on the other side. It takes little imagination to realize what military complications this would lead to.
The fence would not provide an appropriate military response to the complex situation in Jerusalem, in which Jews and Arabs live adjacent to one another, rubbing shoulders each day. On the contrary. An attempt to detach East Jerusalem from the rest of the Palestinian territories is liable to turn the Arab city’s inhabitants—who, up until now, have seldom been direct participants in acts of terrorism—into active partners in the Palestinian struggle.
People will counter me by asking, What do you propose to do in the meantime, until conditions are ripe for an agreement? Isn’t it better to build the fence, so that we can block, at least partially, terrorist attacks?
I wish I could believe that the fence would ward off even some of the attacks in the long run. My fear is that, without a peace process, the attacks it would stop in the short run would simply appear in another, more permeable place. Given the intensity of the conflict, any wall would be a sieve with plenty of gaping holes.
The distress Israelis feel is constant and comprehensible. It derives from the inhuman cruelty of the suicide bombings—the very real threat to one’s personal safety—and from the feeling that there is no end in sight, given the huge support for terrorism in the Palestinian public. But this distress cannot overcome the sense that the Israeli infatuation with the fence is the product of a psychological need. It is not a well-considered diplomatic and military policy.
In establishing a fence unilaterally, Israel is, after all, throwing away the major card it has to play. It would be discarding this trump without receiving anything in return from the Palestinians, while the conflict and Palestinian demands and wounds are still at a boil. Yasir Abd Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of information, said last month in a conversation with Israelis from the peace camp: “If you withdraw behind the fence, we will spend a day celebrating that most of the occupation has ended, and the next day we will continue the Intifada, in order to obtain the rest of our demands.”
Those other demands are well known: Israeli withdrawal from 100 percent of the territories Israel occupied in the 1967 War; evacuation of all the settlements; Arab Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine; and acceptance of the principle of the Palestinian refugees’ right of return within Israel proper.
Yet there is today a good chance of resolving all these issues in negotiations. The Clinton framework plan, which proposes solutions for all of them, has been accepted, in practice, by both sides, even if neither side is able to commence negotiations to put those solutions into practice. But if these demands are not met and are not resolved in negotiations, the Palestinians will continue to fight. In fact, they may even fight more fiercely if they feel that their terrorism has forced Israel into a new ghetto. They will, in fact, be rewarded for terrorism and have an incentive to continue it.