Death as a Way of Life

Yes, Prime Minister

April 1995

After the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians moved on two separate tracks, one toward interim Palestinian self-government and another toward a permanent settlement. The interim track culminated with the Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, known as Oslo II, which Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasir Arafat signed on September 28, 1995. This agreement divided the West Bank and Gaza into three zones, each with distinctive borders and rules for administrative and security controls. Area A, including nearly all of the Gaza strip and six West Bank cities, was to be under exclusive Palestinian control; Area B was to include 450 Palestinian towns and villages in the West Bank, where the Palestinians would have civilian control and Israel would retain responsibility for security; Area C was to include mostly unpopulated areas of the West Bank and would be controlled exclusively by Israel.

During a meeting last week with Palestinian intellectuals, an Israeli asked, “You, our Palestinian colleagues, know just as well as we do that the current difficult spot in the peace process is only a passing moment, and that in the end, after extended negotiations, you will receive what you want — a sovereign Palestinian state and separation of the two nations from each other. Why, then, don’t we hear more of your voices within your society? Why don’t you say this to your compatriots? It’s precisely you who are supposed to be the farsighted vanguard, which can point out the advantages and hopes that the process offers. Why are you, of all people, silent?”

“Because we ourselves no longer believe very much in the process, as we once did” was the reply. “Because we look around us each day and see that large-scale land expropriations still continue, that roads are being paved around each city and village, that the settlements are being enlarged through massive construction projects. We are beginning to feel that, once again, just as in every contact we’ve had with the Israelis, you will defeat us, that you will mislead us; only this time it will happen in such a devious and oppressive way that we will have no chance at all of recovering from it.”

This dialogue will not reveal anything new to people who are in contact with the Palestinians. But it may well be that most of the Israeli public, especially that part of it which supports the peace process, is not sufficiently aware of these sentiments. This response from our Palestinian colleagues, all of whom support peace with Israel and have paid a heavy personal price as a result, requires the members of the Israeli peace camp to make an honest assessment of the (horrific) possibility that we are deluding ourselves.

It is astonishing that this question is not being asked in the moderate, liberal left, how it is repressed and avoided. For decades the left has been exerting a huge effort — acting, thinking, framing ideas, organizing on a large scale. It has succeeded in creating a public atmosphere that, at a fortuitous moment — thanks to the Palestinian uprising — seeped into the reluctant minds of our politicians and propelled them into negotiations.

But ever since the Oslo agreement, this same left has been afflicted with almost complete paralysis. The usual excuse is, of course, that now the government is carrying out what the left predicted and desired and fought for. But is this statement still valid? Is the plan, as it looks today, really what the left had in mind? Have the negotiations with the Palestinians really been conducted in a way that we think will bring about normal neighborly relations, or are they turning (perhaps intentionally?) into one more stage of humiliation for the Palestinians, into an imposition of surrender on them? Is the peace process in fact ensuring that war will continue?

How can it be that in recent months almost no clear voices have been raised on the left asking these questions? Can it be that we on the left are censoring ourselves, preventing this question from even being asked (with all good intention, so that we do not interfere with the process)? Perhaps, in our silence, we are collaborating with a historic debacle whose bitter fruits Israel will have to digest for generations. How can it be that the Peace Now movement isn’t sending out thousands of volunteers to intersections each day to make this other voice heard? Why isn’t it organizing mass demonstrations, precisely now, to exert pressure in the direction where it has always tried to lead? What has happened to the movement? What has happened to the government ministers from the pro-peace Meretz Party?

After all, huge pressure is being exerted on Yitzhak Rabin from the other direction, and its results can be seen in the street, in the public opinion surveys, and soon at the polls (its effect on Mr Rabin’s political and personal behavior is especially notable). Yet on the left — silence. True, the far-left Gush Shalom movement is asking such questions, but they are getting no response and no attention from the more moderate, and larger, part of the left. “How suddenly feeble you are, how have you ceased to give aid,” the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik chided the Zionist leadership in his 1931 poem “You Have Seen the Shortness of Your Reach.” Those lines are now addressed to us: as if we, the people of the word, of the book, of thought, become ineffectual when ideas turn to reality. As if we thought that from here on out, peace is the job of the doers rather than the thinkers. A kind of supernatural sense of security has overtaken us since Oslo, a dubious certainty that may well be based on nothing more than a naïve wishful hope that we have placed our pledge in the hands of a trustworthy emissary who will bring it to its destination, and that from that point forward, peace will prevail.

It is today, of all times, that a voice must come from the left, a voice with great force to pressure the government. The left has a unique talent for blazing a trail out of entrapment and immobility, away from petty squabbles with the Palestinians. There is no good reason to leave the field to the politicians. Especially not at this time. If we abandon it to them now, we will truly be worthy of the dismissive term “bleeding hearts.”

The bitter truth is that most of those who are today “leading” the process were not willing to enter into it until it was more or less forced upon them. Most of them did not read the map properly, did not discern the subterranean flow, the pressure building up with explosive force. After all, it was the long hesitation of the politicians of the right and the left, their denseness, their mental paralysis, their pandering to their voting public, that got us stuck in the disheartening situation we find ourselves in today. Why should we believe that all of a sudden, and in a much more delicate and complex situation, they would be able to reinvent themselves as more flexible and farsighted leaders? To what extent are they really able to change? Imagine a child who plays constantly with a puzzle made from a picture of a wolf. Suddenly the child is told to build, out of the same pieces, a picture of a dove. That, more or less, is the present dilemma of Prime Minister Rabin.

The question we need to ask is: When Rabin speaks (sincerely!) about wanting peace with the Palestinians, is he speaking of the most desirable, true peace for Israel in the long run, the peace for which the left has struggled all these years? The impression is growing stronger that Mr Rabin really means an expanded security arrangement that will fence the Palestinians into autonomous areas of confinement, surrounded and separated one from the other by a dense network of Israeli roads, roadblocks, and settlements.

The distance that Prime Minister Rabin has traveled up until now is worthy of admiration. Few leaders in the world or in Israel have the ability to do what he has done. Still, it is difficult to avoid the impression that belief in the use of force and the fighting instinct that are inherent in his character (an instinct that was most vital in other situations and times) are now preventing him from going the full distance. And this road has to be walked to its end. There’s no stopping before the destination is reached. If we don’t walk to the end, we will find ourselves walking back the way we came.

When it comes down to it, the peace process is, despite reports to the contrary, reversible. Many situations and procedures that were much more solid than this limping peace process were considered “irreversible,” their disappearance “impossible,” until they suddenly came to an end, and from then on the situation arranged itself in a different way around them. If Arafat becomes inactive, naturally or through a violent act; if Rabin continues to hesitate and to contend with Arafat instead of understanding that their fates are intertwined; if the Likud wins the elections; if the peace process is suspended for a few weeks after each major terrorist attack — if only one of these events happens (or any one of a myriad of others), there will be no peace. Not with the Palestinians, or as a result with the Syrians. The entire regional movement toward peace, problematic as it may be, will be frozen. But it won’t be cold here — within a short time Syria will begin to give us hell in Lebanon. The Intifada will renew itself in the strangled, despairing “territories,” this time with violence we have not yet seen.

In order to change this scenario fundamentally, we need to make a much more daring move. We need to shake off the repudiating, ungenerous, derisory attitude our representatives have taken toward the Palestinians during the negotiations. There’s no question that our position in the negotiations is much more comfortable — we have the “merchandise” and they need it; we are strong and they are weak. Error: it’s not so clear that we are only giving and they are only taking. Neither is it obvious that they need this peace more than we do. If that were really the case, Israel would not have been so quick to enter the process.

Isn’t it too late? When will we begin to hear voices that are at least as determined and aggressive as those on the right, demanding of Rabin that he not “defeat them” all that much? That we be much more generous, that we rise above our instinct to wrangle with them, that we remain committed to our original intentions? Or might it be that, deep in their hearts, those on the liberal left also want, even just a bit, to defeat the Palestinians and so “prove”—what? — the left’s loyalty? To whom?