Israel After Oslo

There certainly exist Palestinians capable of accommodating the
Israeli narrative into their understanding of the conflict. Some of
them are my friends and colleagues--a Palestinian Israeli academic
who welcomes Israel's existence as essential for Middle Eastern
evolution, a West Bank sheykh who believes it is God's will that the
Jews returned to this land, a former leader of the first intifada who
has come to realize that Zionism "wasn't just a form of colonialism
but the return of a people home." Understandably, it is easiest for
Palestinian citizens of Israel to reconcile with Israel, more
difficult for Palestinians in the territories, and more difficult
still for Palestinian refugees in the diaspora. The tragedy of the
Oslo Accords was to impose on West Bank Palestinians--with whom
Israel's conflict is, potentially, territorial rather than
existential--the revolutionary leadership of the diaspora, which
represents the Palestinian grievance of 1948; that is, the very
existence of a Jewish state. The effect has been to suppress those
Palestinian voices advocating genuine reconciliation. Even much of
the Israeli Left today concedes that Israel gambled on the wrong man
in mortgaging the peace process to Yasser Arafat. Many other Israelis
would extend that critique to include the entire PLO-Tunis
leadership. Israel has empowered a Palestinian leadership that is
unwilling to revise its morally exclusionist view of the conflict.
Genuine peace is impossible when one partner considers the other's
very existence illegitimate.

The growing tendency among Palestinians and Arabs generally to view
the Middle East conflict as a battle between good and evil has led to
an outbreak of crude Jew-hatred, on both the official and mass
levels, unprecedented since Europe in the early 1940s. By insisting
that Israel's very founding is immoral, much of the Arab world
inevitably finds itself aligned with classical anti-Semitism, which
considered Jewish existence itself a crime. The state-controlled
Egyptian media has revived the medieval blood libel and the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion. Official newspapers in Syria, Lebanon, and in
the Palestinian Authority deny that the Holocaust happened; indeed,
Arab countries are the only places in the world where Holocaust
denial enjoys mainstream credibility. Ahmad Ragab, a columnist for
the Egyptian government-sponsored newspaper, Al-Akhbar, disagreed
with the growing Holocaust revisionism: He noted that the Holocaust
did indeed happen, and he expressed his gratitude to
Hitler--"although we do have a complaint against him for his revenge
on [the Jews] was not enough." A recent hit on Egyptian radio was
called "I Hate Israel"--and the state censor boasted that he inserted
the title line into the song.

Though largely ignored by the international community, this growing
chorus of hatred has reinforced the tendency of the Israeli
mainstream to once again view the Arab world as genocidally-minded.
Holocaust terminology has seeped back into Israeli discourse,
emerging from unlikely sources. In a recent letter of political
contrition written by former left-wing activist Edna Shabbtai to her
friend, right-wing activist Geula Cohen, Shabbtai invoked the
Holocaust in her call for a war against the Palestinian Authority:
"We need to read again the poster that [partisan leader] Abba Kovner
directed at the Jews of Lithuania in 1942: 'Jews! Don't go like sheep
to the slaughter.'"

Despite the growing sense among Israelis that we have slipped back
into the pathology of Jewish history, Israeli society has not
reverted to a simplistic moral understanding of the roots of the
Middle East conflict. Most Israelis still perceive the conflict as
being fought between two legitimate national movements; if a majority
were convinced that a credible partner had emerged on the other side,
they would opt, even now, for partition. While sympathy for the
settlers under attack has grown, there has been no increasein
political support for their annexationist agenda. Israel has
repudiated the illusions of the Left, but it has hardly returned to
the equally fantastic alternative of the annexationist Right. Indeed,
most Israelis would probably agree that, together, both ideological
camps share responsibility for the disaster--the Right, by inserting
armed Jewish fanatics into Palestinian population centers; the Left,
by empowering a Palestinian terrorist army on the border of Jewish
population centers. Together, Right and Left have created the
conditions for apocalypse in the territories.

In this atmosphere, the option that increasingly appeals to Israelis
is unilateral withdrawal--itself an expression of despair in both
greater Israel and a negotiated peace. The advantages of unilateral
withdrawal would be to extricate us from a pathological process that
ties us to a partner whose goal is our destruction, and allow us to
build a fence along borders we ourselves determine as essential for
Israel's security. Unilateral withdrawal would grant the Palestinians
sovereignty over most of the territories, but preserve Israeli rule
over areas of dense settlement, the strategically vital Jordan Valley
and, most crucially, over united Jerusalem. The notion of "sharing"
Jerusalem with a violent and expansionist Palestinian Authority is
now seen by most Israelis--even by many who in principle are prepared
to share sovereignty--as an intolerable security risk that would
almost certainly lead to the dismemberment of the city. The main
disadvantage of unilateral withdrawal would be to magnify the
impression created by Israel's hasty retreat from Lebanon--signaling
the Arab world and especially the Palestinians that Israel is on the
run, thereby inviting further violence and increasing the possibility
of regional war.

In theory, only a national unity government--enjoying overwhelming
public support and headed by Ariel Sharon, who built most of the
settlements--could dare implement a unilateral withdrawal,
necessitating the traumatic uprooting of dozens of Jewish communities
embedded deep in the West Bank and populated by the most
ideologically committed settlers. In practice, though, Sharon has
repeatedly vowed not to initiate any move requiring the massive
uprooting of Jews from their homes, and he should be taken at his
word. True, there is the Yamit precedent--when Sharon, as Minister of
Agriculture in Menachem Begin's government in 1982, bulldozed the
Sinai town of Yamit as part of Israel's withdrawal from Sinai. But
Sinai's historical, religious and especially strategic significance
for Israelis cannot be compared to that of Judea and Samaria. Yamit
existed for barely eight years; by contrast, the West Bank
settlements have already produced a second generation of native
Judeans and Samarians.

Moreover, Sharon has repeatedly dismissed separation as an illusion:
Jews and Arabs, he believes, are too economically and even
geographically entwined. Finally, Sharon has since expressed regret
for destroying Yamit: During a pre-election interview I conducted
with him, he noted that Israel should have withdrawn to the
international border in Sinai only in exchange for genuine peace,
while in practice it received only an extended ceasefire. He will
almost certainly continue to reject the notion of unilateral
withdrawal from Judea and Samaria without a negotiated
peace--inconceivable in the forseeable future.

Still, if the current conflict with the Palestinians deepens and
widens into regional war, pressure from within Israeli society and
especially the army could induce Sharon to invoke the precedent of
1948, when some isolated and besieged settlements were evacuated. As
hatred and self-righteousness increasingly determine the Arab agenda,
the ground is being prepared for that scenario.