Death as a Way of Life

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 citizens, 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.)