Yossi Klein Halevi is lucid and to the point, as usual. Money quote, explaining why the Israeli center still stands behind Arik Sharon: The irony for centrist Israelis like myself is that, in principle, we're ready to make almost any concession, including in Jerusalem, for peace. In practice, though, we're convinced that no concession will bring us peace, because the issue isn't discovering the precise point on the map that will satisfy Arab claims but the Arab rejection of any place on the map for a Jewish state.
___________
It takes two to partition
By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI
In a week when the Sharon government announced negotiations with the new Palestinian government for a second hudna, or cease-fire, and when the text of the "Geneva Accord" appeared as a pamphlet with our morning newspapers, it is useful to remind ourselves what we've learned about the conflict over this last bitter decade. And that is that the Oslo-era notion of a comprehensive peace needs to be wiped from our lexicon.
Instead, we should conceive not of resolving the conflict but of managing its intensity. A hudna isn't merely a means to an end but - at least for the foreseeable future, and possibly for this generation - the end itself.
There are several compelling reasons why a comprehensive peace is now unattainable. The first is the near-total absence, among mainstream Palestinians and the Arab world generally, of the notion that Jewish sovereignty over any part of this land is legitimate. In numerous conversations over the years that I've had with Palestinians, from all levels of society, the consensus that's emerged, with rare exceptions, is that Israel isn't the expression of a people returning home but of a colonialist intrusion in the Middle East. Whether the motive is nationalist or religious, the conclusion is the same: The problem isn't Israel's policies but its existence.
Consider Gen. Nasser Youssef, arguably the most moderate figure in the Palestinian security apparatus. Just recently, Gen. Youssef, who'd been briefly appointed interior minister under the new prime minister, Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala), lost a power struggle with Yasser Arafat, after insisting that all security services should be concentrated under his ministry, to ensure control over terrorism.
Yet even Gen. Youssef doesn't recognize the legitimacy of a two-state solution. In the late 1990s, I participated in several long conversations between the general and several Israelis in his office in Gaza City. When we asked the general how he conceived of peace, he replied that the Jewish people would be absorbed into the Arab nation to which it naturally belongs.
Just as there are Arab Muslims and Arab Christians, he explained, so there are Arab Jews. And the result of the peace process, he concluded, would be the creation of a "beautiful state" embracing Arab Muslims, Christians and Jews.
Even Gen. Youssef, then, is merely a tactical moderate, offering Jews protected minority status under a benign Muslim Arab majority rule. My conclusion from that discussion, and many others like it, is that, at best, the Palestinian leadership sees a two-state solution as an interim stage, and that the deal being negotiated was never land for peace but, at best, land for cease-fire.
A profound asymmetry of perception divides Israelis and Palestinians. For the centrist Israeli mainstream, partition isn't only a pragmatic necessity but an act of historical justice. Arguably most Israelis emerged from the first intifada in the late 1980s convinced not only that the Left had been right about the corrosive consequences of occupation but, more profoundly, of the very nature of the conflict itself, as a struggle between two legitimate national narratives.
Many of us who initially supported Oslo assumed that a reciprocal realization had occurred among Palestinians. In fact, no such transformation of Palestinian consciousness occurred. The opposite: One of Oslo's many ironies is that, by entrusting the education of a generation of Palestinians to Arafat's pathological regime, the Palestinian people are far less emotionally and ideologically ready for peace than they were before the Oslo process began.
The same is true for the Arab world generally. Not since May 1967, just before the Six Day War, when thousands of hysterical demonstrators in the streets of Damascus and Cairo chanted "Death to Israel," has the Arab world been gripped by such an intense wave of Jew-hatred. At every level of society - from government ministers to intellectuals to the person on the street - a "culture of denial" has taken root, which denies the most minimal truths of Jewish history, from the existence of the Temple to the existence of gas chambers. In fact, only in the Arab world has Holocaust denial become part of mainstream discourse.
The strategic implications of that culture of denial is that Israel cannot, at this stage, contract itself into the vulnerable 1967 borders. An approximate return to the Green Line is conceivable only in a Middle East that has renounced its longing to eliminate Israel. And that is possible only if Israel receives recognition of its legitimacy - for now, inconceivable.
The irony for centrist Israelis like myself is that, in principle, we're ready to make almost any concession, including in Jerusalem, for peace. In practice, though, we're convinced that no concession will bring us peace, because the issue isn't discovering the precise point on the map that will satisfy Arab claims but the Arab rejection of any place on the map for a Jewish state.
That despairing conclusion emerges from my deepest instincts as a journalist. Still, that can hardly be my final judgment. That's because I'm not only a journalist but a religious believer, a Jew who sees in our return to this land a hint of the Divine presence in history. Faith requires a believer to reject despair, which exaggerates the power of evil and diminishes God's capacity for miracle. As Jewish history proves, evil may enjoy a seemingly endless ability to inflict pain, but its power to endure is limited.
A believer - especially one who believes that God manifests through human evolution - rejects the notion that what is is what will be. Consider the wild fluctuations of Jewish fate over the past century. Who could have imagined that, within less than a generation of reaching the lowest point of powerlessness in our history, we would reach the point of unprecedented empowerment? Or, for that matter, that four years after attacking Israel on its most sacred day, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would address the Knesset and offer acceptance of Israel into the Middle East? With the war on terror now joined from India to Iraq, not just Israel but humanity is at a crucial moment of transition. As the front line of the Terror War, we must resist the temptation of a quick fix, suppress the subversive question of "what will be?" and learn, as we've done for the last three years, to measure the future in 24-hour intervals, getting through each day.
At the same time, we need to recognize the fluidity of this moment and stay open to new possibilities. In balancing the contradictory insights of politics and faith, our challenge is one of timing: how to avoid premature hope that could once again lead us to disastrous political initiatives, while not missing sudden openings for change.
My political intuition insists on a brutal sobriety. My faith, though, commands anticipation. And so I live at the precise point where despair and hope converge. And that's as good a definition as any of what it means to be an Israeli today.
jpost.com |
