My most instructive conversation on the Middle East conflict was not
with a politician or a journalist but with a soft-spoken Palestinian
Anglican minister named Naim Ateek, whose group, Sabeel, promotes a
Palestinian version of liberation theology. During a long and
friendly talk about two years ago, we agreed on the need for a
"dialogue of the heart" as opposed to a strictly functional approach
to peace between our peoples. In that spirit, I acknowledged that we
Israelis should formally concede the wrongs we had committed against
the Palestinians. Then I asked him whether he was prepared to offer a
reciprocal gesture, a confession of Palestinian moral flaws. Both
sides, after all, had amply wronged each other during our
hundred-year war. The Palestinian leadership had collaborated with
the Nazis and rejected the 1947 UN partition plan, and then led the
international campaign to delegitimize Israel that threatened our
post-Holocaust reconstruction. What was Rev. Ateek prepared to do to
reassure my people that it was safe to withdraw back to the narrow
borders of pre-1967 Israel and voluntarily make ourselves vulnerable
in one of the least stable and tolerant regions of the world?

"We don't have to do anything at all to reassure you", he said. He
offered this historical analogy: When David Ben-Gurion and Konrad
Adenauer negotiated the German-Israeli reparations agreement in the
early 1950s, the Israeli prime minister was hardly expected to offer
the German chancellor concessions or psychological reassurances. The
Germans had been the murderers, the Jews the victims, and all that
remained to be negotiated was the extent of indemnity.

"So we are your Nazis?" I asked.

"Now you've understood", he replied, and smiled.

I have thought often of that conversation since the collapse last
fall of any pretense of a mutual process of reconciliation between
Palestinians and Israelis. With disarming sincerity, Rev. Ateek
offered the most cogent explanation I had encountered for why the
Oslo peace process never had a chance to succeed.

From the start, Palestinian-Israeli peacemaking was burdened by
asymmetry. The gap between Israeli power and Palestinian
powerlessness was translated into a political process that required
tangible Israeli concessions--reversible only through war--in
exchange for Palestinian promises of peace: In essence, land for
words. But the deepest and most intractable asymmetry has been
psychological: it has been an asymmetry of pity, or, more precisely,
of self-pity. The Palestinians, as losers of the conflict, continue
to see themselves solely as victims, without guilt for helping
maintain the conflict or responsibility for helping to end it;
indeed, for many Palestinians, the war is not over borders but
absolute justice, a battle between good and evil. Because history has
been kinder to them, Israelis can afford to concede complexity and,
indeed, the Israeli mainstream now perceives the conflict as a
competition between two legitimate national movements over the same
tortured strip of land. Aside from the hard-right minority, most
Israelis acknowledge that both sides share rights and wrongs.

Zionism's Victory over Jewish Self-Pity

The first generation of Israelis after statehood resembled
Palestinians today in their simplistic view of the struggle over the
land as an absolutist moral conflict. In every generation, as the
Passover Haggadah puts it, a new enemy rises to destroy the Jews and,
for most Israelis, this was the Arabs' turn. A popular Yiddish pun
emphasized the point: Hitler fell into the water, it went, and
emerged "nasser"--Yiddish for wet, and a reference to Egypt's
president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Israel's great antagonist during its
formative years.

Only gradually did Israelis begin to see the conflict with the
Palestinians and the Arab world generally as a fundamental break from
the pattern of Jewish history--that Zionism's hard gift to the Jews
was to restore to us our collective free will, transform us from
passive victims of fate to active shapers of our own destiny,
responsible for the consequences of our decisions. A key turning
point was the November 1977 visit of Anwar Sadat to Israel.
Remarkably, a mere four years after Egypt's surprise attack against
Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year, Sadat was
welcomed as a hero in the streets of Jerusalem. The Israeli notion of
the Arab world as an impenetrable wall of hostility began to change.
So too, Israeli certainty about the justness of its cause was subtly
challenged: Many Israelis, including Ehud Barak, began to suspect
that Israel could have prevented the 1973 Yom Kippur War had it
agreed to withdraw from the Sinai in the early 1970s. The subsequent
invasion of Lebanon in 1982, followed in late 1987 by the first
intifada, reinforced for Israelis the moral ambiguity of the Middle
East conflict.

At the same time, Israel's sense of siege began to ease. The collapse
of the Soviet Union, the repeal of the UN "Zionism is racism"
resolution, the post-Gulf War optimism in the Middle East, the mass
Russian immigration and resulting Israeli prosperity--all reinforced
the same message that Israel had entered a new era and was about to
fulfill the long-deferred Zionist promise of Jewish normalization.
Finally, a new generation of native-born Israelis that could take
Jewish sovereignty for granted no longer saw itself as living in the
pathology of Jewish history but in a new Israeli reality.

Indeed, young Israelis became so distanced from the traumas of Exile
that the Israeli Ministry of Education felt impelled in the 1990s to
introduce pilgrimages to Nazi death camps in Poland for high school
students, as an emotional crash course in Jewish history. In
politics, too, the Holocaust lost its centrality: Only the hard Right
and the ultra-Orthodox continued to cite the genocide of European
Jewry as a potentially recurring threat. Whereas former Israeli Prime
Minister Menachem Begin once routinely invoked the Nazi era--and even
publicly compared himself, during the invasion of Lebanon, to an
Allied commander closing in on Hitler's bunker--his equally
right-wing politician son, Benny, confined his traumas to the Middle
East. Thanks largely to the effects of Israeli sovereignty on the
Jewish psyche, a wound that should have taken generations to heal
began to recede into history. By the time of the Oslo agreement in
September 1993, a majority of Israelis had been weaned from the
self-defensiveness of the victim and educated in the moral dilemmas
of the conqueror.

The Weight of Palestinian Self-Pity

It would be unrealistic to expect a similar evolution among
Palestinians who, after all, lack fifty years of sovereignty to
compensate for their historical trauma. The Palestinians are at a
different stage of their national development, resembling Israel in
its early years, celebrating nationalism and self-sacrifice and
mistrusting moral complexity as weakness. Yet that psychological gap
between Israelis and Palestinians was precisely Oslo's great
structural flaw. The problem with the Oslo process, as Ariel Sharon
has noted, was not its goals but its timetable, its lack of ample
"process." Oslo's implicit expectation was that Israel would return
to approximately the June 1967 borders after a mere seven years of
tenuous relations with the Palestinian entity, well before the
Palestinians could be emotionally prepared to offer Israelis even the
most minimal sense of safety and acceptance in the region.

On the Israeli side, a vigorous and successful effort was made by
Labor Party leaders to wean the public from its emotional attachment
to the biblical borders of "greater Israel." Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon
Peres repeatedly told the Israeli people that the dream of greater
Israel was unrealistic and self-destructive. That message was
reinforced by the Israeli media, often by what we journalists chose
to omit as much as to publish. I recall, for example, reading an
account in the Jerusalem Post's media column, written by right-wing
commentator David Bar-Ilan, just after the White House handshake of
September 1993. The column reported on a speech delivered by Yasser
Arafat in Amman in which the Palestinian chairman noted that by
signing the Oslo Accords he was merely implementing the "stages"
policy--that is, the 1974 PLO decision to accept whatever territory
Israel evacuated and continue struggling until the demise of the
Jewish state. My instinctive reaction was that the account must be
exaggerated: Bar-Ilan, after all, was a right-wing ideologue. Despite
the devastating implications of that speech, I did not bother
checking whether Bar-Ilan's report was accurate, precisely because I
feared that it might be. Nor did I want to be tainted by association
with the right-wing opposition. That combination of wishful thinking
and cowardice characterized most Israeli journalists, at least in the
early years of the Oslo process.

In contrast with Israel's contortionist efforts to adapt to Oslo's
false promise, no attempt was made by Palestinian leaders to
accommodate the Jewish state in their people's mental map of the
Middle East. Indeed, the self-justifying myths of the Palestinians
have only become more entrenched since Oslo. The Palestinian people
are routinely told by their controlled media that the Temple never
existed on the Temple Mount, that the biblical stories did not occur
in Israel/Palestine, and even that the Holocaust is a lie. The
consistent message is that the Palestinians are victims of a false
Jewish narrative.

Rather than challenging the Palestinians' wholesale expropriation of
justice and truth, the international community has encouraged their
self-perception as innocent victims of the Middle East conflict.
Every year on May 15, as Palestinians violently mark the nakba, or
tragedy, of 1948, much of the world's media dutifully replays the
Palestinian version of that event. Few journalists challenge
Palestinian spokesmen with the fact that Arab rejectionism was at
least partly responsible for their people's uprooting and occupation.
Indulging that sense of blameless victimization has only reinforced
the Palestinian inability to assume the role of equal partner in
negotiations and take responsibility for helping to end the conflict.
As Naim Ateek put it, the Palestinians' only obligation to
peacemaking is to show up and receive concessions. The Palestinian
leadership has felt no moral obligation to fulfill its stated
commitments under Oslo--such as curbing terrorism and ending
incitement or even the straightforward matter of revoking the
Palestinian Covenant that calls for the destruction of Israel. (To
this day it is uncertain whether the Palestinians have legally
revoked the Covenant, and their deliberately created ambiguity has
negated any positive impact its revocation may have had on the
Palestinian psyche.)

The apologetics offered by much of the international community--and
by part of the Israeli Left--for Arafat's violent rejection of
Barak's peace offer have reinforced the pathological tendencies of
Palestinian self-pity. Especially absurd has been the claim that
Barak's settlement-building was a sign of bad faith that undermined
Arafat's trust in the process. Nearly all the housing starts begun
under Barak were concentrated in areas intended to become settlement
blocs--whose permanence the Palestinians accepted during negotiations
at Camp David. According to Barak's chief negotiator with the
Palestinians, Gilad Sher, settlements--whose total built areas cover
a mere 1.5 percent of the West Bank--were not even among the five
major issues of disagreement during the Camp David negotiations.
Instead, the major issues were the Palestinian insistence that Israel
assume full moral blame for the flight of the refugees in 1948
(ignoring the Arab world's invasion of Israel that preceded the
refugee crisis), and the Palestinian refusal to acknowledge any
Jewish connection to the Temple Mount, Judaism's holiest site.

When confronted with the continued ideological intransigence of the
Palestinians, the Israeli left-wing retort was invariably a sarcastic
dismissal: "We don't expect them to become Zionists." Even as it
successfully compelled a reluctant Israeli publicto confront at least
some truths of the Palestinian narrative, the Left refused to demand
any reciprocity from its Palestinian partner. In so doing, the Left
ignored its own argument: that without accommodating the Other's
narrative, peace would be impossible.

The Israeli Left committed one more fatal tactical mistake: It
divorced itself emotionally from Judea and Samaria, even as the
Palestinians reinforced their emotional claim to pre-1967 Israel. The
moral basis for partition of Israel/Palestine is that two peoples,
profoundly rooted in the entirety of the land, must each sacrifice
part of its legitimate claim to accommodate the legitimate claim of
its rival. But by tacitly rejecting even a theoretical Israeli right
to Judea and Samaria, the Left created a moral imbalance: The
Palestinians were offering a traumatic concession by ceding parts of
historic Palestine, whereas Israel was merely restoring
occupied--that is, stolen--land. That imbalance reinforced the
Palestinians' refusal to compromise on the 1967 borders, even though
no independent Palestinian state had ever existed on any part of the
land.

The success of Oslo was predicated on the Palestinians' ability to
convince Israelis to trust them enough to empower them. But soon
after the White House signing, increasing numbers of Israelis began
to suspect they had been deliberately deceived. That process
accelerated with Arafat's 1995 speech in a Johannesburg mosque, in
which he compared Oslo to a ceasefire the Prophet Muhammad signed
with an Arabian tribe he later destroyed. By dismissing that speech
as mere rhetoric intended to appease domestic opposition, the Israeli
Left made a fatal miscalculation of its devastating effect on the
Israeli public. Then came the wave of suicide bombings in early 1996,
which further eroded Oslo's credibility among even centrist Israelis
and provided a link between Arafat's incitement and intensified
terrorism.

The inevitable result was a revolt by the Israeli majority that had
initially welcomed the Oslo Accords and that had been willing to make
far-reaching concessions for genuine peace. The first revolt occurred
in 1996, with the election of Benyamin Netanyahu. Apologists for the
Palestinians insist that Israel under Netanyahu helped destroy the
Oslo process by resuming massive settlement-building, largely frozen
under Rabin, thereby eroding Palestinian trust in Israeli intentions.
That argument ignores the fact that the election of Netanyahu was a
self-inflicted Palestinian wound--a direct result of Arafat's refusal
to fulfill his most minimal obligations under the Oslo accords. The
erratic voting pattern of the Israeli public throughout the Oslo
process--repeatedly veering between Left and Right, from Yitzhak
Rabin to Benyamin Netanyahu to Ehud Barak to Ariel Sharon--reflected
both the growing skepticism of Israelis and their reluctance to
repudiate the hopes raised by Oslo. Only with the landslide election
of Sharon, who had warned for decades against empowering the PLO, did
the Israeli people deliver its definitive judgment on the Oslo
process, as one of the gravest mistakes in the history of Israel.

Unchanged Palestinian Goals

By refusing to "partition" justice and insisting that historical
right belongs exclusively to them, the Palestinians have preempted
the need, in their minds, to revise their long-term goal of undoing
the "injustice" of Israel's existence. Indeed, when Palestinian
leaders speak of a "just and lasting peace", it is now clear that
they mean, in the long term, peace without a Jewish state. Mainstream
Palestinian leaders no longer invoke the old crude slogan of throwing
the Jews into the sea. Instead, the scenario has become more complex,
a gradual eroding of Israel that includes undermining its will to
fight and to believe in itself; loss of territorial intactness; a
compromising of its sovereignty via international commissions,
observers and "peacekeepers"; increased radicalization of Arab
Israelis leading to demands for "autonomy" and even the secession of
those parts of the Galilee and the Negevwhere Arabs could soon form a
majority.

Indeed, the key element in the "stages" plan is the massive
return--both through Israeli consent and illegal infiltration--of
embittered and inassimilable Palestinian refugees to pre-1967 Israel.
By refusing to concede the "right of return", the Palestinian
leadership belies its claim that it has recognized Israel in its
pre-1967 borders. For Palestinians, the great crime of Zionism was
artificially transforming the Jews into a majority in any part of
Israel/Palestine--through Jewish immigration ("colonization") and
Arab expulsion and flight. In a stunning speech to Arab diplomats in
Stockholm in 1996, Arafat laid out his vision of undoing the Jewish
majority even within pre-1967 Israel. By overwhelming the land with
refugees and expropriating water and other resources as well as
turning a blind eye to ongoing Palestinian terrorism, Arafat would
ensure that a large part of the Israeli middle class would emigrate
in despair to the West. The remaining Jews would be so disoriented
and demoralized by the departure of Israel's most talented citizens
that the state would eventually collapse from within.

That this was no mad fantasy on Arafat's part but an accurate
reflection of mainstream Palestinian strategy was confirmed by the
late Faisal Husseini, long considered by the Israeli peace camp to be
among the most pragmatic Palestinian leaders. In an interview with
the Egyptian newspaper Al-Arabi, Husseini made the remarkable
admission that the Oslo process was a "Trojan horse." He explained:
"When we are asking all the Palestinian forces and factions to look
at the Oslo Agreement and at other agreements as 'temporary'
procedures, or phased goals, this means that we are ambushing the
Israelis and cheating them." The goal, he concluded, was "the
liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea"--that is, from the
Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Though it appears that
Al-Arabi's claim that its interview with Husseini was the "last"
before his death in June is false, the veracity of its substance
should not be doubted; Husseini made similar statements in a meeting
with Lebanese lawyers in Beirut last March.

In a private conversation I held about two years ago in Gaza with the
head of one of the dozen or so Palestinian security services
established by Arafat, I was offered a benign vision of that dream of
Israel's demise: "This land is too small to sustain two states",
explained the commander. "When the refugees return, there won't be
enough resources and we will be forced to create one state--a
beautiful country that will show the world how Muslims and Jews can
coexist, just like in the days of Muslim Spain." That historical
model, of course, is based on a Muslim sovereign majority and a
dependent Jewish minority.

It is hardly coincidence, too, that the model most invoked by Arafat
for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is South
Africa. Israeli left-wingers misinterpreted that constant reference
to South Africa as proof that the PLO leadership had embraced
peaceful reconciliation. In fact, what most appeals to Palestinian
leaders in the South African precedent is the transition from
minority to majority rule. Though the Jews constitute a slim majority
in the whole of Israel/Palestine and an overwhelming majority within
the pre-1967 borders, Palestinian leaders believe that this is a
temporary aberration. When the refugees begin returning (and Jews
begin leaving), the "natural" majority will reemerge, and the Jewish
minority, like the white South African minority, will then be
compelled to negotiate the terms of its own surrender. This is why
Nabil Sha'ath, the pa Minister of Planning and International
Cooperation, told a Washington audience on June 21 that the January
2001 Taba negotiations "witnessed significant progress." Of what did
that progress consist? "A conceptual breakthrough on the issue of
refugees and the right of return", said Sha'ath, who described
Israeli negotiators as acknowledging that "Israel was responsible for
the initiation of the refugee problem" and as agreeing that "the
Palestinians had a right to return to both Israel and Palestine."

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.