Death as a Way of Life

Hours Before the Elections

February 2001

Prime Minister Barak resigned from office on December 9, 2000, following a long struggle to maintain his coalition government. His pro-peace position was weakened by a growing support for the right-wing parties that called for exercising greater military force in repressing the Intifada. Ariel Sharon, leader of the Likud Party and a former general as well, promised voters in his campaign both peace and security. After months of terrorist attacks and dozens of Israeli victims, this is what the Israeli public was yearning for. Israel was about to vote for a new prime minister. There was no doubt as to the outcome of these elections.

Today I ran into a reservist who served with me in the Lebanon War. Children were born to both of us back then. He sighed as we spoke. In 1982 Ariel Sharon led us into a trap in Lebanon. How awful it is to think that the children born to us then are the soldiers that he will lead tomorrow, should he win.

There you have it, the whole story: Sharon remains; only the soldiers change.

Sharon’s misconduct in that war led a national commission of inquiry to disqualify him from ever serving as minister of defense. In any properly run country he would have left public life and shut himself up at home. But in the Israeli political system one of the surest ways to success is to collect a large number of failures (and that will, apparently, be Ehud Barak’s only hope after tomorrow).

A non-Israeli may have trouble understanding the secret of Sharon’s seduction of the Israeli public. But the average Israeli perceives Sharon as a “strong man” who has spent his entire life fighting the Arabs and has had the courage to face them down. Over a period of more than fifty years, Sharon has had a part in every important military and political campaign, and in many respects he is, for Israelis, one of the last living Sabra heroes, the native-born Israeli who is daring, rooted in the land, and prepared to fight for it to the death. In both his appearance and character he reminds many of a biblical figure — a man of great physical prowess and primal urges, cunning, shrewd, and brave.

On the other side stands Barak. Until he became prime minister, he was considered Israel’s most courageous soldier. But now he is considered a man who lost his determination and nerve, groveling before the Palestinians, agreeing to all their demands. To most Israelis, Barak has been willing, in exchange for a tenuous chance at achieving an ambiguous peace, to abandon Judaism’s most holy sites and Israel’s strategic assets.

Sharon’s plan is astonishing in its simplemindedness and illogic. He declares that he will not evacuate even the tiniest settlement in the territories. He announces that, as far as he is concerned, “compromise” means a willingness not to reoccupy the territories that have already been handed over to the Palestinian Authority. Yet, on top of all this, he promises Israel a “secure peace.” Apparently, most Israelis long to believe him, and will, most likely, vote for him.

On second thought, this is no surprise, as Palestinians are murdering Israeli civilians almost daily. The average Israeli, who knows nothing about Palestinian suffering or losses, is certain that the Palestinians are only squeezing more and more concessions out of Israel, with their ultimate goal being not compromise but the destruction of Israel.

So when Sharon comes along and promises that he’s got a solution, the despairing Israeli prefers to believe him rather than to come to terms with the fact that the present path, the frustrating path of negotiation, with its painful compromises, is the only path we have that can lead to peace.

Sharon is selling Israelis a miracle cure — he says he won’t negotiate under fire. “If they shoot, we don’t talk.” To put it in simple language, Sharon is prepared to place the future of the peace process, Israel’s future, the future of the entire region, in the hands of every fifteen-year-old boy from Nablus or the Deheisheh refugee camp who’s got a Molotov cocktail hidden behind his back. Because if they shoot, we don’t talk.

Sharon promises, with absolute certainty, to “wipe out terrorism.” Despite his decades of run-ins with terror, he has still not learned that it can’t be obliterated by military means alone. One can certainly not wipe out the struggle of a nation with a solid national consciousness, motivation, and both great hope and great despair.

Do any of Sharon’s supporters really believe that he will have any more room for maneuver than Barak has had? Can anyone today seriously believe that Israel will always be able to do whatever it pleases in the Middle East, without paying a terrible price for it? Will Israel always enjoy American support for realizing its belligerent fantasies? Will there eternally be enough Israelis to follow their leaders into more wars that could have been prevented?

This writer has much criticism to level against Ehud Barak. Against the way he acted, his style of interpersonal relations, his tactlessness toward both those close to him and his enemies. But I am certain of one thing: it would have been impossible to lay one’s hand directly on the deepest part of the Israeli-Palestinian wound — as Barak did — without causing an eruption of the kind that has occurred. It couldn’t have been done without awakening all the most primal fears, instincts, insults, and loathing, without shaking the cratons on which the two peoples, the Israeli and the Palestinian, live.

I do not see today any other leader who would have dared to put the very core of this historic conflict on the table, raising all the most underlying questions about the Israeli and Palestinian identities, boundaries, and true existential concerns.

Barak did it. Not with great enthusiasm, certainly, not with profound personal recognition of the need to concede and compromise. Most of all, not with respect for his Palestinian partner, or with real sensitivity for his suffering and his plight. But, little by little, by twists and turns, we saw him shake off the illusion of force, the harsh and narrow military view of the world.

Do we now have no choice but to wait for Sharon to change as well? To wait for him to recognize the limits of force, the limits of reality, and reach the same insights that Barak did? What price will we all have to pay for Sharon’s schooling? And who can promise us that this man will transform himself, his way of life, his character, to their very roots?

Israel’s citizens have never before faced a decision that demands such responsibility and maturity, such a need to overcome their fears. The Israeli public must act against the wild instinct to vote from the gut, to punish the Palestinians, the left, Barak, and life itself, which demands such difficult and threatening compromises from them. But those who are not prepared to delude themselves, who live here in this tormented and turbulent region, know deep inside that there is no choice but to carry on with this difficult and frustrating process — to continue, while making concessions, to manage this complex conflict with wisdom and resolution, until finally, slowly, some years from now, the conflict fades away.

In a few hours we will know — not only who Israel’s new prime minister is, but also to what fate we have condemned ourselves and the entire Middle East.