We are standing over a very large abyss and no leadership able to keep us off the edge, in fact, much of it, particularly, the US, either standing off to the side, or, in some cases, the Iranian, for instance, pushing us toward it.
You know I class Arafat together with the Iranian leadership. Question is, can one side alone ever save us from the edge while the other side is pushing towards it? (I would also class our friends the Saudis as pushers in this equation) Perhaps sometimes there is no choice left but war or surrender.
The Post also had the view from the Israeli side of the fence. The mostly deadly thing about the conflict is, the Lebanonization of the territories has cut off Israeli lines of retreat. Withdrawal now equal victory for Hamas and Hizbullah.
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When Israelis Talk of a Fence, It Isn't Only About Security
By Yossi Klein Halevi
Sunday, February 10, 2002; Page B01
JERUSALEM--Along with the old competing slogans about a whole generation that craves peace and an entire nation that stands with the Golan Heights, a new bumper sticker has begun appearing on Israeli cars: "A Protective Fence, the Only Way." The slogan is a demand for a security fence along the unmarked 192-mile border between Israel and the West Bank, to prevent the unbearable ease with which terrorists cross from the territories into Israeli cities.
But the "fence now" movement conceals a deeper longing -- for a rational border against an irrational Middle East. In the early years of the state, Israelis accepted imposed isolation from the Arab world as inevitable. Then the Oslo peace process tempted us with the vision of a benign Middle East, and we began considering economic and even cultural integration into the region. Now though, with the outbreak of Yasser Arafat's terrorist war, Israelis are once again wondering whether we can ever find our place in a region where government newspapers promote Holocaust denial and suicide bombers are revered as holy men.
Two distinct separation plans have emerged. The first, promoted by a movement called "A Fence for Life," is wholly security-focused. "A fence isn't a political solution," says Ilan Tzion, a lawyer and the group's founder. "Its only purpose is to prevent terrorism. We don't speak about uprooting settlements; it's not a practical issue now. The army will remain on both sides of the fence. Palestinians won't be prevented from entering Israel, only checked, just like in any country." The group has won backing from right-wingers as well as from former Oslo supporters like Tzion himself. But while Tzion says that settlements closeto the 1967 border would be includedon the Israeli side of the fence, settler leaders oppose the plan, arguing that what begins as a security fence will ultimately become a political border.
That is precisely the goal of those advocating the second, more drastic version of separation -- Israeli withdrawal behind a closely guarded fence. In that scenario, Israel would uproot dozens of the 150 settlements and allow Palestinians to form a state -- essentially a unilateral imposition of Ehud Barak's offer at Camp David in July 2000 to withdraw from most of the territories, minus the Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem. Leading members of the Labor Party, such as Haim Ramon and Shlomo Ben-Ami, as well as former Israeli security service head Ami Ayalon, novelist and peace activist A.B. Yehoshua and Likud Knesset member Michael Eitan, all endorse variations of the plan.
Left-wing advocates view separation as a temporary measure, diffusing tensions until final-status negotiations can resume. And separation would salvage at least one of the peace camp's goals -- ending the occupation, if not the war. For right-wing supporters, separation is the final status, determining the country's security borders and ensuring a united Jerusalem under Israeli rule. Even left-wing supporters of separation agree that, at least for now, Jerusalem cannot be divided: Sharing the intimate workings of this city with Arafat would only further entwine the two sides and undermine the logic of separation.
Separation is not a plan; it is an act of despair, acknowledgment that, at this point, the conflict can only be managed, not solved. Unilateral withdrawal would end the two visions that dominated Israeli discourse for the last two decades -- a greater Israel and a negotiated peace. The first intifada of the late 1980s disabused the Israeli mainstream of the absurd notion that Israel could dominate another people and still remain a worthy Jewish state. The second intifada has discredited the equally absurd notion that Israel could import tens of thousands of PLO terrorists into the territories, outfit them with police uniforms and turn them into allies against terrorism.
Separation advocates are defining a new Israeli center that has emerged from the wreckage of Oslo. For the past 30 years, Dan Meridor, strategic planning minister in the current government, and noted political scientist Shlomo Avineri were on opposite sides of the Israeli divide. Now, though, they both agree on the urgency of separation. Meridor, a veteran supporter of a greater Israel, concedes that the left was right all along when it warned against absorbing several million Palestinians into the Jewish state. "To have a state that is both predominantly Jewish and democratic, there must be a border between Israel and the Palestinians," says the soft-spoken, almost diffident Meridor. And Avineri, a former director-general of the foreign ministry and one of the first mainstream Israelis to advocate negotiating with the PLO, implicitly acknowledges that the right was correct when it warned against dealing with Arafat. "The Palestinian leadership doesn't accept the fact of the state of Israel's existence," he says.
For a centrist like myself -- someone who rejects the failed policies of both right-wing militancy and left-wing appeasement -- the separation argument holds a certain allure. If we can't occupy the territory where Palestinians live or make peace with them, the only solution would seem to be a unilateral determination of our borders. Separation has appeared to me to be a sign of a new Israeli sobriety: Perhaps for the first time since the Six-Day War, a majority of Israelis no longer view the territories through an ideological prism, but would accept almost any plan that will work.
But now I wonder whether separation wouldn't be just one more reckless Israeli initiative. Withdrawal under Palestinian fire would convince the Arab world that more violence would yield more Israeli concessions -- just as Israel's flight from Lebanon two years ago helped convince the Palestinian leadership to adopt the "Hezbollah option" to the territories and launch the current intifada. After withdrawal, attacks could continue, especially from the Syrian-dominated Hezbollah, and those could escalate into regional war.
Even after withdrawal, Israel would remain in control of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in greater Jerusalem -- the numbers vary according to how greater Jerusalem is defined. And separation, of course, doesn't address the Jewish state's demographic crisis: One million Arab Israelis, who increasingly identify themselves as Palestinians and whose Knesset representatives publicly advocate violence against Jews, are full-fledged citizens living within the pre-1967 borders. They are one of the fastest-growing portions of the population.
For now, separation isn't likely to appear on the Israeli government's agenda. Opposition to unilateral withdrawal is one of the few ideological points that binds the strange coalition of Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres. Prime Minister Sharon -- who notes that he grew up with Arabs and never expected to live without them, either as neighbors or adversaries -- opposes separation as untenable. Foreign Minister Peres opposes separation as a negation of his dream of a negotiated peace and admission that he drastically miscalculated by empowering Arafat. Instead, Peres agrees with Sharon that Israel should aim for another interim agreement that grants Palestinians limited statehood in those parts of the territories they already control. The two disagree about what would happen next: Sharon wants a prolonged trial period testing the stability of Palestine before negotiating its final borders, while Peres wants to hold those talks within a year of Palestinian statehood.
Still, for all its resistance to separation, the Sharon government has just approved a massive security program to surround greater Jerusalem with checkpoints and trenches. In doing so, it has managed to anger Palestinians and right-wingers alike. Palestinians denounce theplan as unilaterally determining the city's borders, while some Israeli right-wingers fear it could mean detaching Jerusalem, and eventually the Jewish state, from the West Bank. Several communities in central Israel that border the West Bank already have erected their own fences and walls -- an ironic reversal of what Israelis used to call facts on the ground. Instead of creeping annexation of the West Bank, those initiatives are the first signs of a process of creeping separation.
Lost in the debate over the fence is a sense of historical irony. Zionism believed that Jews needed to live in their own state; it opposed the spirit of the Jewish ghetto. The purpose of the state wasn't to withdraw from the world, but to create the basis for a new and integrated relationship with the rest of humanity. Now, advocates of a fence are proposing a self-imposed ghetto, sealing us from our neighbors.
Even Jerusalem, which has suffered the trauma of divisiveness, is flirting with walls. Road One, which connects Jerusalem's northern neighborhoods with the city's center and winds around the crenellated walls of the Old City, passes the area once known as the Mandlebaum Gate, the border that divided East from West Jerusalem before the 1967 Six-Day War. Groups of Israeli schoolchildren are routinely brought to this nondescript spot along the highway and told how a barbed wire wall once cut through the capital. Then they are taken to the nearby Museum of the Seam, which offers films and interactive exhibits on coexistence between warring groups -- like secular and ultra-Orthodox Israelis, and Palestinians and Jews. Nearby, at the entrance to the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim, a roadblock has recently been placed, and border policemen scan each car before it enters West Jerusalem, as if the border had never vanished.
Yossi Klein Halevi is the Jerusalem correspondent for the New Republic and a senior writer for the Jerusalem Report. His most recent book is "At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land" (Morrow).
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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