Lead article of The Other Israel, September 2008
It never happened before: a President of the United States twice visiting Israel within less than half a year. Still, it was universally seen as the non-event it was. A fast declining George W. Bush striving, without much conviction, to prop up his fellow lame duck Olmert, haunted by corruption charges.
During his second visit in June Bush indeed dropped also the pretence of brokering peace, omitting to make even a pro-forma visit to the Palestinians and instead delivering on the Knesset floor what right-wing members described as "the most Zionist speech heard in the House for many years."
(Palestinian militias in Gaza chose to remind the US President and his Israeli hosts of their existence by revealing their possession of a missile more advanced than they were hitherto known to posses, and shoot it at an Israeli shopping mall in the city of Ashkelon).
The religious-nationalist settlers on the West Bank, with their astute understanding of the political scene, eloquently expressed their opinion of Olmert's peace talks by failing to hold even a single demonstration to protest the "major concessions to the Palestinians" of which hints were periodically leaked to the press.
Instead, the settlers conducted discreet negotiations with Olmert's aides - as well as those of Defence Minister Barak - and secured assurances of continued construction in the "illegal" or "unauthorized" settlement outposts, whose dismantling had been repeatedly and formally promised by Israel since 2003.
The accelerated settlement construction was revealed to the world again and again - through the tireless efforts of the Peace Now Settlement Watch team, by journalists keeping their eyes open, sometimes through government ministers themselves revealing it in order to appeal to right-wing constituencies.
Each such revelation entailed some weak expressions of protest from the State Department, devoid of the slightest hint of pressure, and more or less the same from the European Union. The EU rejected a proposal to suspend the upgrading of it relations with Israel, opting instead to go ahead with the upgrading and append a letter of protest - which was presumably filed away in a convenient cabinet at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem.
Nor could the Palestinian Authority do much more with such limited authority as is left to it. President Abbas had cut off negotiations in the immediate aftermath of Annapolis, over the announced building of hundreds of apartments at the Jewish-only Har Homa neighborhoods in East Jerusalem.
He did get a kind of promise from Olmert that this would be the one and only settlement extension. Resumption of face-to-face meetings was followed by dozens of new settlement projects in various locations, including a still further extension of Har Homa - but the Palestinian negotiators did not walk out again.
These later stages of the "Annapolis Process", miserable and rundown successor to The Madrid Process and The Oslo Process, hardly attained even the dignity of photo opportunities. The regular meetings of Olmert with Abbas and the periodic visits by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice steadily declined in media coverage and gained virtually nil public interest.
The resumption of talks between Israel and Syria, after an eight-year break - though indirectly this time, under Turkish mediation, and with some involvement by French President Sarkozy - did not fare much better. After the mediagenic initial announcement, the talks were swiftly relegated to the back pages.
Some press articles hinted at Olmert's willingness to restore the Golan to Syrian rule in return for peace and the ending of Syria's strategic alliance with Iran. Still, the Golan settlers - like their fellows on the West Bank - seemed completely unfazed by Olmert's peace pyrotechnics.
There was no evidence of big rallies by settlers and their supporters, such as accompanied earlier rounds of Israeli-Syrian talks, in 1993 and 2000. "It's just words, we are extending construction here with full government financing and that is what matters" a Golan settler leader told Ma'ariv.
Anyway, soon it was all overshadowed by the revelations of Olmert's squalid sordid corruption scandals. Many of us did not bother to read all the full, garish details, though they filled the main newspaper pages for months.
Suffice it here to say the end was clear and inevitable long before Olmert finally ceased his valiant but hopeless effort to cling to power, and that the PM's various rounds of talks lost their last crumb of credibility. Indeed, the Syrians sensibly cut it all off "until the political situation stabilizes in Israel and the US".
If we were to follow our well-established practice, the next pages of this small paper would have been devoted to the intensive struggle going on for Olmert's inheritance - a rather shabby and sordid struggle, with a dearth of principled positions and a surfeit of naked, opportunistic power grabs.
Likely, such a detailed analysis would have come to the not very startling conclusion that we can't trust Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni - who has been a central participant in the futile talks with the Palestinians - but that we like even less her three contenders for powers, all of whom are vocal proponents of aggressive nationalism and militarism.
However, an increasing number of peace-minded people here turn their heads away in disgust from the whole issue, feeling that Israeli mainstream politics are no longer relevant and that whatever government arises would take no real steps to end the occupation and settlement. Some people are driven to take up bright utopian dreams. Others simply drop out of the struggle, singly and imperceptibly, retire to their homes and private lives or sometimes drop out of the country altogether.
So, it might be a better idea - at least this once - to devote the next pages to a longer historical look at where we have come from. Which might give us a slightly better idea of where we can expect and hope to be going.
The great error
The conflict in which we are still trapped could have been predicted, from the first moment when the Zionist Movement arose in the late 19th Century to claim possession of what it regarded as the ancestral soil of Eretz Yisrael (to begin with, even many of the Zionists called it "Palestina"). Indeed, it had been predicted - with chilling precision - at the very start, long before anybody ever heard of a Palestinian National Movement.
In the early 1890's the prominent Russian Zionist Asher Ginsberg - better known by the nickname "Ahad Ha'am", "One of the People" - returned full of foreboding from a visit to the scattered few communities which the fledgling Zionist Movement had by then managed to establish in Ottoman Palestine.
He warned about "the great error" which he had observed, the error of treating the Arab fellahin (peasants) with contempt, as "savages of the desert" and "a people similar to donkeys". (There were, even then, some violent clashes and confrontations with these "savages" and "donkeys" - but most Zionists dismissed them as manifestations of "banditry".)
Ahad Ha'am had a possible solution in mind: "Cultural Zionism" - i.e., restricting the movement's goals to creating a "Cultural Center" which would provide inspiration to Jewish communities worldwide, but would not seek to physically "ingather" all these Jews into that single ancestral country.
Ahad Ha'am was given a prominent place in the pantheon of Zionism's Founding Fathers. Most Israeli cities have a street named for him, and his (less controversial) articles figure in the curriculum of Israeli schools. His ideas, however, had never been taken very seriously.
Rather, the Zionist Movement stuck to the twin courses of seeking diplomatic recognition from the world's major powers for its claims over the country, while simultaneously establishing "facts on the ground" in the form of ever-larger exclusively Jewish enclaves.
At least in principle, Zionism intended that every single Jew in the world would eventually arrive in the country - or, at least, enough of them would come to "make Eretz Yisrael as Jewish as England is English."
With Zionist aims like these, conflict with the Arab inhabitants of the country - the Palestinians - was inevitable. Nobody, in this or any other country, could have been expected to calmly acquiesce in such designs on the land that they had every reason to regard as their own. The historically accurate fact that Jews had lived in the country 2000 years ago notwithstanding, nowhere else in the world had a land claim of such antiquity ever been seriously advanced, much less given international validity.
Anti-Semitism and Jewish persecution in Europe were all too real even before the Holocaust. But it was certainly not the Palestinians who were to blame or who could logically be asked to pay the full price for the solution. (Nowadays, when the boot is on the other foot, the State of Israel is far from generous or welcoming to refugees from the Darfur Genocide, who try to find asylum within its borders...)
So, the cyclical pattern of two peoples ferociously confronting each other, with violence reaching a new peak more or less once a decade, was launched. In 1921 (and again in 1929 and in the Great Rebellion of 1936 to 1939) Palestinians sought to display in unmistakable and bloody terms that while His Majesty's Government in London might "view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people", the people who actually lived in the land itself had a quite different view of the matter.
It was not too long before Zionist leaders realized that Zionism could not and would not be implemented with the consent of the Palestinians, and that its implementation would require the ruthless use of brute force.
It was Ze'ev Jabotinsky, leader of the right-wing Revisionist Zionism, who first advocated in clear and unambiguous terms the creation of a Jewish armed force strong enough to crush Arab resistance.
But it was David Ben Gurion, proponent of Labor Zionism and Jabotinsky's implacable ideological foe (or so it looked at the time) who energetically took up the building of the Jewish militia - the same militia which in 1948 would be transformed into the Israeli army, establish the Jewish state which Zionism dreamed of and in the process dispossess hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their towns and villages, lands and homes.
Together against colonialism?
At a night hour in August 1929, a small group of idealistic Jews and Arabs were sitting together in a small house at the Arab village of Beit Tzafafa, on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem.
They were busy composing a leaflet in Hebrew and Arabic, which was to be printed on their clandestine press later that night and distributed in the morning - calling upon the working masses of both peoples to resist the escalating waves of nationalist and religious incitement, and unite in a common struggle against British colonialism.
But that leaflet never got printed or distributed.
Suddenly, a pale-faced comrade burst into the room with news of blood and horror from Hebron.*
The activists who so long ago tried to stem the tide of blood are no longer with us. Babies born at that time would soon be eighty. Still, the poignant experience is all too familiar also to the present generation of activists, who again and again find their best-laid plans foiled and must start again.
Dissidents there have always been, all along the decades of mounting hatred and bloodshed. People of widely disparate social backgrounds, political and ideological stripes have again and again protested and advanced all kinds of creative proposals and plans.
The Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Jewish communities had lived in the country for many generations as a religious minority among Arabs, patiently waiting for God to send the Messiah in his own good time.
Initially, they saw the Zionists as "sacrilegious interlopers and rebels against Divine authority" who waved the Bible "title deed to the land" even while flagrantly trampling on major creeds and commandments.
In the early 1920's, the Ultra-Orthodox conducted their own anti-Zionist diplomacy towards the British and the Arabs - represented by the capable and articulate Dutch-born Jacob Israel de Haan, who was thereupon assassinated by the newly-founded Hagana (Labor Zionist militia).
Then, in 1929, an alleged anti-Muslim sacrilege in Jerusalem by radical Zionists was answered by a brutal Palestinian attack on the ancient non-Zionist Jewish community of Hebron. Dozens were massacred, though many members of the Hebron community were saved by their Arab neighbors (a fact never mentioned by the present Hebron settlers, spuriously claiming to be heirs of that community).
After 1929, the Haredi communities saw little choice but to turn to Zionist militias for defence in times of trouble. Most of their ideological and political heirs in present day Israel - with the exception of the marginalized, anti-Zionist diehards of "Neture Karta" - are well-integrated in the Israeli state apparatus and often take the most intransigent of nationalist positions.
From a completely secular - angle, some of those who had come to the country as enthusiast pioneers for the dream of a progressive Jewish-socialist experiment soon became rebellious at the reality. All too often, Arab tenant farmers were evicted from land bought from absentee landowners, so as to make place for the egalitarian but exclusively Jewish Kibbutz communities. Nor were they charmed by the Histadrut trade unions campaigning for the expulsion of Arab workers from their workplaces - in order to facilitate the development of "a class-conscious Hebrew working class."
The left faction of "Poale Tzion" (Workers of Zion) tried their best to reconcile Zionism with organizing Jewish and Arab workers in joint struggle. They were attacked by the Zionist mainstream and ridiculed by the Communists to their left.
Communists regarded Zionism - in particular, the idea of a Jewish state - as narrow, reactionary nationalism and persistently opposed it in the name of a vast Internationalist vision. This, however, did not make them completely immune to the divisive conflict. Jewish or Arab Communists were on occasion affected by nationalist tides passing through their respective societies, resulting in some bitter dissension in the Communist ranks and several painful splits.
Nevertheless, the Communists did succeed in creating a solid and enduring nucleus of Jews and Arabs united, not only in a common struggle but also in a common social milieu. This core has endured through the countless crises and vicissitudes of nine decades, and still exists at the present - an achievement certainly deserving appreciation even from those not sharing in the now tarnished vision of World Revolution.
But the Communists were never in a position to offer leadership to the mainstream of either the Jewish or Arab society - not even during the Second World War, when for a time the Soviet Union was extremely popular for its crushing of Hitler.
Zionism and decency
Aside from those altogether opposed to Zionism and its works, there were of course quite a few dissident voices among adherents of Zionism - claiming to be its most pure representatives. There were Socialist Zionists who took their Socialism quite seriously, and Liberal Zionists, and Democratic Zionists, and those who combined one or more of these varieties with being Religious Zionists.
Quite a few idealistic, kind-hearted people most sincerely believed Zionism to be the most emancipatory and progressive of movements and ideologies, and refused to believe that implementation of Zionism meant the creation of "An Iron Wall."
The philosopher Martin Buber gathered quite a few prominent intellectuals in his "Brit Shalom" (Covenant of Peace), ancestor of the Israeli peace movement. In the 1920's he and his friends advanced the idea that a Jewish State was not needed for the implementation of Zionism.
On the contrary: a bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs would share power equally and in amity was in complete accord with what Theodore Herzl had envisioned (for which some fitting quotations could be found in the voluminous writings of Zionism's founder - then already decades in his grave).
Also the Hashomer Hatza'ir Kibbutz Movement inscribed on its banner the slogan of 'Zionism, Socialism, Brotherhood of Peoples', and its program called for the creation of 'A Socialist Bi-National State in Palestine' (though this design was not quite compatible with its quest for land on which to erect exclusively Jewish Kibbutzim).
However, the bi-national idea was never attractive to the Zionist mainstream, whatever Herzl may have written about it.
Sometimes they may have found it expedient to avoid the words "Jewish State", using instead such euphemisms as "National Home." And once the idea of partition came on the agenda in the mid-1930s, Zionists were deeply and hotly divided on whether their state must embrace the whole country or could make do with a part only.
But essentially the majority of Jews who had come over to this far land in the Middle East no longer believed in achieving true emancipation and equality in the countries where they came from. And, indeed, the situation in the Europe of the 1930's was not encouraging.
Those who nevertheless believed in sharing a society with non-Jews had no special incentive to come to the then British Mandatory territory of Palestine. And the ones who did were bent on carving out "a place where Jews would be their own bosses."
When David Ben Gurion was asked why the Histadrut - of which he was Secretary General at the time - did not accept Arab members, he said explicitly: "Had I wanted to head a trade union of Jews and non-Jews together, I could as well have stayed in Russia."
And for their part, the Palestinians were far from willing to share their country with those they regarded as foreign colonizers - either through a constitutional arrangement establishing parity between the two peoples in the running of the entire country, or through a territorial division and partition.
Present-day Palestinians, looking back upon decades of oppression and dispossession, may think wistfully of lost opportunities. But few of their pre-1948 forbears could see this dire future - while, plain to see all around them in the Middle East, there were other Arab countries which already in the 1930's were making considerable strides towards self-government and complete independence - not being asked to share their land with anybody.
Judah Magnes, American-born rabbi and President of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, regarded the university as the ideal place for Jewish and Arab cooperation, and outspokenly opposed the concept of a Jewish State which he said "could only create a new Balkan."
In 1937, with the country torn by the strife of the Great Arab Revolt and European Jewry increasingly threatened, he wrote: "With the permission of the Arabs, we will be able to receive hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews. Without the permission of the Arabs even the four hundred thousand [Jews] that now are in Palestine will remain in danger, in spite of the temporary protection of British bayonets" (New York Times, 18 July, 1937).
Eleven years later - in the midst of what was to be variously known the Israeli War of Independence or the Palestinian Nakba (Disaster) - Magnes traveled to America on a private diplomatic mission. He met with Secretary of State Marshall, asking him to stop the war by not recognizing the state which Ben Gurion was about to declare and imposing stringent US economic sanctions on it.
He died a few months later in New York, his last public act to withdraw from the leadership of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which he had helped establish - because it had not answered his plea for help for the (than newly-created) Palestinian refugees.
'As Jewish as England is English'
It has been said on more than one occasion that nobody is "The Bad Guy" in his own story. Mainstream Zionists and Israelis had - and still have - a strong penchant for self-righteousness and placing themselves on the moral high ground. Particularly, with regard to the harshest part of their history - the war of 1948 (strictly, of late 1947 to early 1949), which resulted in the State of Israel, being created and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians being dispossessed.
True enough, it was Israel that had accepted the UN Partition Resolution while the Palestinians and other Arabs have rejected it. Which is hardly to be wondered at - since at that time, partition of the country meant to Zionist Jews that they would at last get the state they dreamed of, while Nationalist Palestinians regarded it as unjustly taking away half of their homeland. (In later times, when partition came to imply the Palestinians getting a state of their own and Israelis having to withdraw from occupied territory, attitudes to the idea of partition miraculously reversed themselves.)
And in all sober truth, the war that Israel fought in 1948 was a war of survival. The Zionist movement did not have to claim a land where somebody else lived, to go on for decades claiming this land and settling in it without the consent and against the clearly and vehemently expressed opposition of its inhabitants, and finally to declare a state in it with the full knowledge that this was tantamount to declaring war. But having done all that, over the seventy years leading up to 1948, there was no alternative to winning the war.
The 600,000 Jews resident in the country had in effect staked everything on one throw of the dice, and the consequences of defeat would have been dire indeed. (The few Jewish villages and neighborhoods which fell into Palestinian hands in 1948 were as thoroughly depopulated as were hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns.)
To be sure, though only a few stated it that bluntly, how was Eretz Yisrael (or any part thereof) to become "as Jewish as England is English"? How, other than by finding an opportunity to "get rid" of the Arab population? (Had the Palestinians accepted partition, would Ben Gurion and his fellow leaders have truly accepted from their side a state with a 40% Arab minority - envisioned in the UN resolution - as the definite fulfillment of the Zionist dream?).
At the time, it was not only Israelis themselves who were certain of their own righteousness. It is rarely remembered nowadays that in 1948 - a bare three years after the Holocaust - Zionism and Israel were a popular progressive and left-wing cause all over the world.
Israel got the sympathy and support of much the same kind of people who would nowadays almost automatically support the Palestinians - the idealistic people, the people with a sense of justice, who tend to jump in vehemently at the side of the underdog. It was all too easy to overlook the moment when those who just arrived from the Displaced Persons Camps in Europe took part in displacing others, dispatching them to new Refugee Camps all over the Middle East. .
And the dissidents, whose story we have out to trace? It is sad, but not very surprising to note, that in the course of this year and half of terrible and bloody war there was no organized political group to make any clear outcry and protest about the ongoing dispossession of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and fields and orchards.
Nevertheless, in quite a few places there were spontaneous manifestations of decency. Not especially motivated by clear-cut political ideas but, sometimes, simply by long-lasting good neighborly relations with a nearby Palestinian village.
Our friend Teddy Katz uncovered the horrible story of the village of Tantura, where victorious Israeli troops embarked on mass killing of captured villagers - but he also found evidence for the arrival of Jewish neighbors who did succeed in stopping it and saving the lives of many. In the same area, the village of Furadis survived more or less intact due to the intervention of its Jewish neighbors, while all other Palestinian villages along what became Israel's Mediterranean coast were destroyed.
Benjamin (Ben) Dunkelman - a Canadian Jewish veteran of the Second World War, who sympathized with the fledgling Israel and came to help in its war, was in command of the forces that captured the town of Nazareth in July 1948. What followed he recounted many years later in his autobiography, entitled "Dual Allegiance":
"(...) General Haim Laskov came to me with astounding orders: Nazareth's civilian population was to be evacuated! I was shocked and horrified. I told him I would do nothing of the sort, and reminded him that scarcely a day earlier he and I, as representatives of the Israeli army, had signed the surrender document in which we solemnly pledged to do nothing to harm the city or its population. When Haim saw that I refused to obey the order, he left.
Twelve hours later I was informed that I was being replaced. Avraham Yaffe reported to me with orders to take over as military governor of Nazareth. I complied with the order, but only after Avraham had given me his word of honor that he would do nothing to harm or displace the Arab population. He kept his word." At the end of the war, Dunkelman went back to Canada.
Soon after the war, S. Yizhar published his famous and controversial story "Hirbat Hiza", where the protagonist soldier watches the expelled Palestinian villages and thinks, "This is what going into exile looks like." Still, most Israelis believed, or chose to believe, that "The Arabs ran away by themselves."
The state of Israel, as it emerged in the beginning of 1949, comprised vast tracts of fields and orchards, hundreds of depopulated villages and towns, which the government very energetically proceeded to either destroy or repopulate with Jews while bestowing new Hebrew names.
These lands and towns and villages were made, consciously and deliberately, into the foundation and cornerstone of Israel - so that to reverse the process would be to reverse the existence of Israel. All Israelis were made into accomplices, sharing in one way or another in the loot. One's home, or one's workplace, or the street on which one goes strolling - it all might be land whose original owners and inhabitants had been driven to a refugee camp somewhere.
The printing shop where this paper you hold was published is located where a Palestinian hamlet called Wadi Yusif used to be. This fact can be known - to those who want to know - by comparing the detailed British map of 1945 Palestine with the present-day street map of the Israeli city of Holon, which engulfed it and a dozen others. But there is no visible indication on the ground: Wadi Yusif, with its huts, fields and orchards, has been razed and replaced by the drab buildings of Holon's extensive industrial zone.
Years of innocence
In reviewing the above history of our political ancestors, who in their time worked for peace and coexistence with quite as much devotion and creative energy as do the best activists of the present, one cannot escape the conclusion that their work was foredoomed to failure. In the pre-1948 there simply did not and could not exist a common ground, a program which would have accommodated both the fundamental Zionist aim of making Eretz Yisrael Jewish and the basic Palestinian aim of keeping Palestine Arab.
The situation after 1948, when it seemed that Zionist aims have been triumphant and Palestinian ones totally broken, was not conductive either to reconciliation.
At first it seemed that the very name of Palestine had been erased. Palestinians were dispersed to refugee camps where they were considered "a humanitarian problem"; those in the West Bank were annexed to Jordan through a tacit understanding between Israel and the Hashemite Monarchy; those crowded into the Gaza Strip kept in a kind of unclear limbo under Egyptian rule; those who managed to stay in Israeli territory designated "Israeli Arabs" and given a very unequal citizenship. Many of the Palestinians themselves in the 1950's tended to submerge their separate Palestinian identity into the hoped-for Pan-Arabist future, uniting the Arab World from Morocco to Iraq.
But the suppressed Palestinian problem stubbornly refused to disappear. Israel failed to achieve peace and recognition by its neighbors. Tensions and the threat of war, a small scale daily war and the periodic outbreak of a big war, became part of Israeli existence.
For most of the people, all this had little or nothing to do with what Israel itself had done in the past or what it could do in the present and future. Rather, it was all the result of Arab malevolence and fanaticism, soon personalized in Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt - "The Tyrant of the Nile" as official Israel called him for many years.
Peace would come one day, when the nasty Arabs would change their minds and hearts and leave innocent, peace-loving Israel alone. Until then, there was nothing to do but pray for peace and meanwhile strengthen the Israeli Defence Forces, the army which was "reluctant to fight and wished to become unemployed" but did fight, again and again, because "there was no other choice." Its emblem consisted (as it does up to the present) of the entwined Sword and Olive Branch.
Not everybody quite accepted this view of things. Peace groups and organizations arose in these decades, in some cases the direct ancestors of those still active at present. Indeed, some of today's veteran activists have started to be involved in this very time, such as Uri Avnery - then a former combat soldier embarking on the career of a muckraking, taboo-breaking journalist and editor of the Haolam Hazeh weekly.
Many struggles were waged on specific issues, and some of them crowned with success. Most notable, the harsh military government which long blighted the lives of Israel's Arab citizens, and was the focus of many years of protest, was finally abolished in 1966 - that is, just one year before a new military government came into being in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
And there were other struggles - against the confiscation of Arab lands in the cause of "Judaizing the Galilee," Activists demonstrated, and clashed with police, and sometimes went to prison - the forerunners of today's' struggles on the West Bank.
There were those who strongly protested the commando cross-border raids carried out by a unit under a young and ambitious major named Ariel Sharon, and which often included the indiscriminate killing of civilians in Palestinian villages then under Jordanian or Egyptian rule.
After the publication of an especially outspoken editorial on this issue, Avnery was attacked at night by mysterious masked assailants and got both arms broken; the police had no success whatsoever in its investigation of the affair.
The Kafr Qasem Massacre of 1956, where the victims were Israeli citizens on Israeli soil (though certainly not treated as such by the armed forces of what was supposedly their country) was long hushed up by use of the military censorship (than far more powerful than nowadays).
Exposing it was difficult and dangerous, but was nevertheless accomplished by a coalition in which Avnery teamed up with the Communist MK Tufik Tubi and the (still active) Latif Dori, then embarking on his career at the left Zionist Mapam Party.
The government was finally forced to admit and denounce the massacre, and also put on trial the soldiers and officers involved in putting 49 civilians to the wall and shooting them in cold blood. Not that they stayed behind bars very long - but at least, this trial produced the often-quoted, precedent-setting Supreme Court verdict: "There are some orders on which the Black Flag of Illegality flies. Such orders a soldier is entitled, and indeed obliged, to refuse. Obeying such orders would leave the soldier criminally liable for his acts."
1956 also saw some opposition to the Israeli war with Egypt, launched in coordination with France and Britain - seen as the last effort of the old colonial powers to maintain their power in the Middle East.
For the first time, Israeli soldiers - such as then Reserve Lieutenant Ya'akov Chen - went to prison for a politically motivated refusal of orders (purely pacifist CO's there had been even in 1948). This was, however, soon forgotten - being only rediscovered very long afterwards by activists of the 1980's refusal movement.
And there were those who objected to the constant vilification and demonization of Nasser, calling for rapprochement with him and with the forces he stood for, and pointing out that the 1956 war - whose unspoken aim was to topple Nasser - only increased his popularity in Egypt and all over the Arab World. In retrospect, various official "experts" nowadays state that "Nasser's Pan-Arabism was not as bad as Islamism"...
The "Semitic Action" group of the late 1950's went further in calling for Israel's full integration in what they said should be called "The Semitic Region", instead of the Eurocentric term "Middle East."
One particularly irresponsible aspect of the government's anti-Nasser policies got attention far beyond the boundaries of the radical and dissident groups. In the early 1950's, Israeli intelligence recruited young idealistic Egyptian Jews to place bombs in American and British cultural centres in Cairo, with the idea of thereby sowing divisions between the Egyptian government and the West. In the event, they just got their hapless dupes caught, some being hanged and others spending many years in harsh detention.
At the time, this was presented as harsh anti-Semitic persecution of blameless Jews by the Nasser regime, and streets in Israeli cities were named for "The Martyrs of Cairo."
But a few years later, Ha'olam Hazeh circumvented military censorship and at last the public could understand what was the fiasco for which senior figures of the country's political and military establishment were blaming each other. Though all the debate on "Who has given the order" never led to a clear answer - it did lead to the stormy end of David Ben Gurion's career as Prime Minister.
Though this was for several years the main issue on the Israeli political agenda, it failed to develop into any serious discussion of the underlying issues of Israel's attitude to Nasser's Egypt in particular, or its place in the Middle East (or "Semitic Region") in general.
In May 1967, regional tensions flared up almost overnight, in a process on which several books were already written and which has not yet been completely explained. Nasser and other Arab leaders made dire threats, which in retrospect perhaps should not have been taken completely seriously - but which at the time did succeed to create panic in the 19-years old State of Israel.
Also most people who had been critical of government policies before - and who would be again - felt constrained to support what seemed to them on the morning of June 5, 1967, a war waged in self-defence.
As in the pre-1948 period, when examined in retrospect it is clear that the peace-minded Israelis active during the country's first decades were not able to offer a clear-cut, concrete political plan of action that they could urge on the government and ask society in general to endorse. Not because they were not dedicated and creative, but because of the sheer impossibility of finding any common ground.
A concrete political plan, going beyond a general wish and hope for peace, would have needed to be potentially acceptable to all the parties to the conflict:
# The mainstream of the Israeli Jewish society - still exultant at its newfound independence, considering the achievement of a Jewish state as a dream come true;
# The scattered Palestinians, for whom the same event was the worst of nightmares, and who were slowly and painfully struggling to re-assert themselves under the new leadership of Yasser Arafat (at that time still virtually unknown to the Israeli public);
# The various Arab countries whose regimes were not always truly and unambiguously supportive of the Palestinians (often quite the reverse) but had to appease their own masses.
Even with the aid of hindsight, it is difficult to formulate a concrete peace plan that could have been offered to all sides.
Clearly, nobody had found it at the time - and then there was a new war and more bloodshed, which produced a rather different situation.
Expansion vs. Jewishness
Ironically, precisely the great speed of the Israeli victory in 1967 was a key factor in saving the Palestinians a repetition of 1948. With Israeli troops conquering the entire West Bank in just two days, there just was no time for the kind of systematic depopulation of towns and villages that accompanied the creation of Israel.
To be sure, some expulsions and dispossessions did take place - such as the destruction of the Mugrabi Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, so as to create the vast Wailing Wall Plaza, allowing observant Jews to gather on the site of the destroyed Palestinian homes and mourn the destruction of the Temple 1900 years ago.
Protests by conscientious Israelis succeeded in saving the city of Qalqilya - which under orders from then Defence Minister Moshe Dayan, the army already started to demolish and expel the inhabitants. Unfortunately, they were too late for the four villages of the Latrun Panhandle area, which were razed (later, the large "Canada Park" was created in their place).
So, Israel gained control over territory inhabited by a very considerable Palestinian population. Thereby, Zionist Israel was faced with agonizing dilemmas and contradictions inherent in its own dominant ideology, which remain unsolved to this day. The Palestinians came back out of two decades in the shadows and into the limelight and the center of Arab, worldwide - and Israeli - attention.
And also, as a direct result of the 1967 war, a plausible and concrete plan for a solution - i.e., the creation of a Palestinian State in the West Bank and Gaza Strip - suggested itself to quite a few people at more or less the same time.
So simple and obvious (or so it seemed) that it was first suggested even before the war ended - and already then, suggested as a concrete idea for immediate implementation. Yet now, more than forty-one years later, it is far from being implemented, and doubts increase that it ever will.
The slogan "Down with the Occupation" was initiated by the radical "Matzpen" group, which was viscerally opposed to Zionism and all its works, before as well as after 1967.
Matzpen activists scrawled "Down with the Occupation" on the walls of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in the very aftermath of the war, to the view of an uncomprehending general public still very much captivated by victory euphoria.
Slightly later, the slogan "Israel and Palestine - two states for two peoples" came to be frequently chanted at radical demonstrations, especially those of the Communists and their supporters - a bit less radical than Matzpen, but still considered on the very left side of the spectrum.
But there were good and cogent reasons why a growing portion of the Israeli public could and did eventually take up such themes: that Israeli rule over the Palestinians was an occupation which must come to an end, and that letting them create their own national state was a good and preferable solution.
One clear reason was a moral revulsion from the role of arrogant occupiers and oppressors. Quite a few were moved by one specific experience - during military service, on a casual visit to the territories, by acquaintance or friendship with a Palestinian.
The maverick Professor Yeshayahu Leibovitz - sharp tongued, staunchly religious intellectual who found support mainly among secularists and atheists - sounded immediately in aftermath of the 1967 war the dire warning that prolonged occupation would corrupt the Israeli society.
Nowadays, observation of Israeli politics and of how Israelis often treat each other - never mind their treatment of the Palestinians - can often lead to the conclusion that Leibovitz was "even more of true prophet than he knew."
Indeed, rejection of the occupation is more than a moral position. It can also be considered an act of enlightened self-interest, a realization of the limitation of power and that Israel - implanted by brute force in an environment where it was emphatically not wanted - could only hope for long-range survival by exchanging occupied territory for recognition and acceptance by its environment.
This would necessitate Israel to set itself limits and boundaries - physical borders beyond which it would not further encroach on the lands of its neighbors, and moral boundaries of a reasonably civilized mode of behavior. (Yesh Gvul, name of the movement of reserve soldiers refusing military service in the Occupied Territories, could be translated as both "There is a border" and "There are limits" - and it was chosen with both meanings in mind).
In all debates taking place among Israelis since 1967 - whether among wild youths on a street corner, respectable professors in the halls of Tel Aviv academe or veteran rival politicians on the Knesset floor - the essential question to be answered was always one: Are the Palestinians (and other Arabs) really willing to accept such a deal? For, in effect, the two-state solution, implicitly or explicitly, requires Palestinians to accept what was done to them in 1948 - recognize it, at least, as a fait accompli.
Times when Israelis are more or less convinced that the answer is "yes" are the times of success and upsurge for the peace movement. It is far more difficult when Palestinians are seen - whether or not rightly - as intransigent and holding on to their claim for the entire country.
If in any case Israel would not be truly recognized and accepted, so people tend to think, one might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb.
Then, the other pole of Israeli society comes out of the closet: the rapacious, insatiable nationalists, who insist on devouring every last possible inch of land and who find in the Bible an inexhaustible source of justifications for conquest, for land robbery, for trampling down on everyone who is not Jewish (and on some Jews as well).
There is not, and cannot be, a real symmetry between occupier and occupied, oppressor and oppressed. Nevertheless, the debate going on among Palestinians is to a great degree a mirror image. If it gets recognized, would Israel in truth disgorge at lease the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which are little more than 20% of historic Palestine?
If it does, negotiations and recognition of Israel make sense. But if it does not (and in the past decade Israel had given much of a reason for doubt), why should Palestinians give up their claim over land that they regard as having been stolen from them?
End of consensus
Between the easy victory of 1967 and the highly problematic war of 1973, under the lead of PM Golda Meir, Israel passed through a period of hubristic euphoria and contempt for its Arab neighbors. This attitude was mercilessly ridiculed by Hanoch Levin in his play "Queen of the Bathtub" whose presentation at the Cameri Theater was disrupted by violent right-wingers.
Dissidents and opponents, small in number, saw themselves as "the only wakeful people", determined eventually to "wake up" the rest of Israeli society.
Meanwhile, the patterns of Israeli settlement in the Occupied Territories were being established - settlements officially established by the government, usually for "security purposes", and settlements established by militant religious-nationalists who create "facts on the ground" and subsequently get recognized by the government.
Conversely, the same period also established patterns of protest actions. When the fields of Akrabeh Village were sprayed with defoliants to make place for the new settlement of Gitit, activists of Siach ("Israeli New Left") arrived to protest and were brutally chased through the hills by club-bearing soldiers - the first of countless such occasions.
The right to demonstrate in front of the Defence Ministry gates in Tel Aviv - nowadays taken for granted, even considered somewhat clich? - had to be stubbornly fought for. In the 1970's, police would instantly pounce on anybody raising a placard outside the center of Israeli military power.
The army's reputation was considerably tarnished by the fiasco of the Egyptian-Syrian surprise attack on October 1973. In the aftermath, a grassroots movement sprung up, led by soldiers returned from the front and calling for the resignation of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan - which was achieved after two months.
This movement had no wider aims or unifying principles. In fact, some of its members went on afterwards to establish new settlements at the heart of the West Bank while others were involved in the then very radical and "subversive" idea of conducting dialogue with the "terrorist" PLO.
The Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (ICIPP) (from which The Other Israel originated), was founded during Yitzchak Rabin's first term as Israel's Prime Minister.
People such as former general Mattityahu (Matti) Peled, former Finance Ministry Director Ya'akov Arnon and former Labor Party Secretary General Aryeh Eliav - dissidents originating from the heart of the establishment - went together with outspoken Knesset Member Uri Avnery to meet with Yasser Arafat's emissaries (not yet with Arafat himself, at this stage) and bore messages for Rabin.
Rabin agreed to meet with them and patiently hear what the Palestinian leader had to say - but never to send a message back. "If I do that I would already be negotiating with Arafat, and that I will never do" Rabin said (in 1975 and 1976).
Still, they published as much of these contacts as was possible and gradually the idea of talking to the PLO - and of making one day peace with a state dominated by the PLO - started to become a bit more acceptable to a growing number of people in Israel.
To the streets
1977, Rabin stepped down immediately upon the publication of a very minor scandal, which by today's standards of public morality would have hardly merited any mention in the media.
Subsequent elections were won by Menachem Begin - hitherto the very epitome of an ultra-nationalist demagogue - arousing great apprehensions of war. But Begin's emissaries went to meet secretly with those of Egyptian President Sadat, to secretly promise withdrawal from the whole of Sinai - and suddenly, Sadat came off the plane in Ben Gurion Airport and went to speak at the Knesset.
The visit of Sadat is a major watershed moment for the Israeli peace movement - and for Israel as a whole. People went out ecstatically to the streets of Jerusalem, to greet the President of Egypt, and continued feeling euphoric for a week or more. Peace had suddenly ceased to be a distant and unrealistic dream, and became - at least, so it seemed - a most real, concrete, palpable possibility.
An instant result was that the Israeli peace movement was no longer the business of a handful of intellectuals. Peace Now came into being almost overnight, capable of mobilizing people in the tens of thousands.
On the eve before Begin was to set out to meet Sadat and Carter at Camp David, there was a crowd filling Tel-Aviv's Municipal Square under an enormous banner - very readable on the TV screens: "Begin, go in peace - and bring us peace!"
All commentators agreed that there was a clear causal connection between this rally and Begin's decision to dismantle all settlements in Sinai. An acknowledged victory for a newly founded mass peace movement.
It also established a paradigm: Extra-parliamentary movement mobilizing support in the street and exerting grassroots pressure on the government; government, like it or not, making peace and dismantling settlements; PM rewarded by the Nobel Peace Prize.
All this seemed to work extremely well in 1978 - but there were many inherent problems with this model, which would become evident with the passage of time.
To begin with, Menachem Begin never seriously intended to make peace with the Palestinians, His whole purpose was to detach Egypt - the strongest of all the Arab states - from its support of the Palestinians; to sacrifice (as he saw it) Sinai and the settlements in Sinai in order to gain a free hand for filling the West Bank ("Judea and Samaria" as Begin stridently insisted on calling the area) with settlements.
And so it went - settlements and more settlements, thoroughly changing the face of the West Bank in a few years; deeper oppression, soldiers shooting daily in the streets of Palestinian cities; negotiations with Egypt on "Palestinian Autonomy" which did not have any outcome, and were never meant to have any outcome except for serving as a smokescreen.
In all this, too, a new paradigm was established, which would be followed again and again in later decades - with considerable success.
Insincerity on the Israeli side was reciprocated on the Egyptian side. Peace with Israel was kept to the letter, never broken whatever nasty new tricks were perpetrated by the Israeli side - if only because Begin had secured for the Egyptian economy a huge annual aid package from the United States, which Egypt could never have achieved by any lobby of its own on Capitol Hill.
But the psychological barriers between Israelis and Egyptians, which Sadat sought to bring down, came back up all too quickly. Israeli-Egyptian peace, which is by now more than thirty years old, has long ago become a Cold Peace, a matter for politicians and diplomats which can mobilize no grassroots enthusiasm among either people. This, too, was an ominous precedent that we did not fully understand at the time.
The most controversial war
1982, and the invasion of Lebanon - brainchild of Ariel Sharon, whom Begin made into Minister of Defence. A brilliant idea: the PLO in Beirut was directing Palestinian resistance on the West Bank. Therefore, let the army go after them into Beirut and obtain a pacified West Bank and an Israeli protectorate in Lebanon and a whole "New Order in the Middle East." Menachem Begin - Nobel Prize and all - turned out to be after all the perpetrator of aggressive and bloody war, exactly as so many people feared when he was elected in 1977.
This sense of betrayal, of being angry with ourselves for having been taken in by Begin's peace rhetoric, partially accounts for the vehemence of the anti-war movement which mushroomed from day one of the Lebanon War. A few dozens dispersed by police, growing into hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands.
The Bir-Zeit Solidarity Committee, which before the invasion of Lebanon organized protests at the army closing down the Palestinian university, transformed itself into The Committee Against the Lebanon War and got twenty thousand people into the streets, one month into the war.
Peace Now at first stood aloof, arguing (the accepted wisdom) that "one doesn't demonstrate while the shooting goes on." But more and more of its activists joined in the protests of the more radical groups, and reserve soldiers phoned to the Peace Now leadership from the front itself, angry and frustrated at the blatant lies of the government propaganda (for they were there, and could see the truth with their own eyes).
And Yesh Gvul got founded and swiftly got thousands of reservists to sign the petition:
"We have sworn to defend the territorial integrity of the State of Israel, and we remain faithful to our oath. But we never swore to be occupiers of another country and oppressors of its people, and this we refuse to do."
And, again Uri Avnery "broke the rules" crossing into besieged Beirut and conducting his sensational personal meeting and journalistic interview with Yasser Arafat.
At last, Peace Now took the plunge and called a demonstration of its own which attracted a full hundred thousand people, and the idea that in wartime activists should "stand aside, not to demoralize the troops" was buried forever. Peace Now, for its part, started to affect those deeper in the mainstream, especially in the Labor Party - which would come to a head in the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila horror.
Hours after we saw on our TV screens the dead bodies piled in the streets of the Beirut refugee camps - murdered by militias which had been armed and loosed by the state of Israel - there were already activists battling with police on Tel-Aviv's Dizengof Street and being sprayed with tear gas in Jerusalem and banging on the metal walls of the vans taking them off to detention and crying out at the top of their voices "Begin - Murderer! Sharon - Murderer!"
And a whole week of furious protests all over the country - more than at any time before or after - culminated with the grand rally in Tel Aviv. The number of 400,000 participants, published at the time, is still disputed - but certainly it was bigger than any rally or gathering held before in Israel.
Israel, which had gotten only the slightest whiff of the 1960's "counter-culture" when it swept through American and Europe, got rather more of a facsimile two decades later.
And another paradigm was established: the wheels. The small wheel of the radical groups turns and moves the bigger wheel called Peace Now, which turns and moves still bigger wheels like the Labor Party - and finally, the impetus originating on the Left end of the spectrum produces a real effect at the very center.
It was a valid and useful way of seeing things, at that time and long afterwards. Even so, in retrospect the effect produced was not always as good as we thought. Ariel Sharon was finally driven out of the Defence Ministry - but as we now know, this was far the end of his political career.
In 1985, when the banner headlines announced "Army withdraws, Lebanon War over", the great mass of the peace supporters took it at face value - particularly since by than, Shimon Peres was in the government.
It was only the small radical groups that smelled a rat. It would take another ten years (and quite a lot of Israeli and Lebanese lives) before the public understood the full sinister significance of the "Security Zone" retained by Israel in South Lebanon.
'The Intifada is not against me!'
Lebanon was forgotten, for a time, when the Intifada - the First Intifada, one should say now - suddenly broke out in December 1987 (suddenly, though the signs were there to see, long before): another major turning point and watershed moment for everybody.
On the wall of the room where this article is being written, there is still hanging a green sticker (a bit faded, after twenty years) reading 'The Intifada is not against me - I am not against it.'
If there had ever been a time when a considerable number of Jewish Israelis could feel an understanding or even sympathy for Palestinian aspirations, than the first years of the First Intifada were that time.
It is very difficult to convince Tel Avivians that they are mortally threatened by Palestinian boys, in the streets of their own village confronting soldiers with bare hands or stones - and ready to die in the encounter. It made simple, common sense to tell ordinary people "They just want us to leave them alone, to let them have a state of their own, like we have."
So there were a lot of demonstrations and protests, some of them very big, And two thousands reserve soldiers declared refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories, and two hundred of them actually went behind bars. And the well-known Abie Nathan was imprisoned twice for meeting with Yasser Arafat - after it had been made legally "a criminal offence" - and hundreds came to express solidarity outside the prison walls.
Also in the general public, among those who would never go to demonstrations, it became increasingly clear that Israel could not go on indefinitely keeping the Territories.
All of which did not mean that there was any immediate improvement in the situation. Palestinians continued to be killed day by day and suffer at the hands of the army. It was not really surprising that when Saddam Hussein of Iraq put himself up as the champion of the Palestinian cause, there was a positive response from the Palestinian masses.
The good Israeli liberals, however, were deeply shocked, and Yossi Sarid of Meretz declared, "The Palestinians can come looking for me." And the story that Palestinians were "dancing on the rooftops" when Iraqi Scuds were falling on Tel Aviv got wide circulation, as yet another proof of Palestinian perfidy. (Little mention of the fact that they were on their rooftops because the Israeli army placed them under a month and half of total curfew and did not allow them out of their houses).
At that time, the Israeli mainstream's quarrel with the Palestinians did not last long. Especially because George Bush the father, unlike his son, did mean to have some results when he dabbled in Middle East peace making through his determined Secretary of State, James Baker.
Yitzchak Shamir wanted to engage in the good old game of playing at negotiations and meanwhile building settlements - but for once, there was an unequivocal angry reaction from Washington, and Israeli public opinion turned against Shamir, whose career soon came to its end.
Enter Yitzchak Rabin. Elected Prime Minister of Israel in June 1992, assassinated in Tel Aviv on November 1995 - the years when peace seemed closer, more of a real possibility, than at any time before or after.
The wave of hope
In retrospect, with such thick layers of myth accumulated around his person, it is difficult to realize that the Rabin of 1992 was far from the most plausible candidate for the role of Bold Peacemaker. As few now remember, he was just a few years removed from being Rabin the Bone Breaker, whose brutality in the Intifada years caused his name to be greeted by loud boos in Peace Now rallies.
In his elections campaign he did promise to voters exasperated with Shamir that he would "make an agreement with the Palestinians within six to nine months."
But what Rabin did deliver during his sixth month in office was to have 415 Palestinian Islamic activists snatched from their beds and thrown across the Lebanese border. (It was at that time that Gush Shalom was founded, originally under the name of "Jewish-Arab Committee Against the Deportations", which for two months maintained a protest tent outside the PM's office).
Rabin did authorize the secret negotiations at Oslo which eventually led to the Agreement, and when the moment came he did take the act connected most indelibly with his name - shaking the hand of Arafat on the White House lawn (from his expression, captured in the famous photo, he did it reluctantly).
This was in September 1993, precisely fifteen years ago (hardly anyone nowadays bothered to commemorate the date). Looking back, that moment was the time of greatest receptivity for the Israeli and the Palestinian public - a time of great hopes, of a fresh start, of a flagrant breaking of taboos.
After all, the act of shaking hands with the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, as the Prime Minister of Israel did in view of the whole world, had been just half a year before been a criminal offence for which people actually went to prison.
At that precise moment, with mental barriers falling down and the right-wing opposition thrown into utter confusion, the general public might have swallowed more easily than at any later time the breaking of more taboos, as necessarily involved in a full-bodied Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. And incidentally, this might have saved Rabin's life.
But while the public might have accepted it, the Yitzchak Rabin of September 1993 was clearly in no mind to offer anything of the kind. Nor were the more dovish members of his cabinet, not even Yossi Beilin - who, more than anyone else, had hatched the Oslo Agreement and got the PM to nurture the fledgling.
What was presented to the Israeli and Palestinian public was the premise of an interim agreement to be followed by more interim agreements - a slow and gradual process whose final goal was left deliberately vague. 'Constructive ambiguity' was intended to "solve the easier problems first" and thus build confidence and facilitate the solution of harder problems.
At least the well-meaning Israeli intellectuals/diplomats, who drafted the agreement together with well-meaning Palestinian intellectuals/diplomats, and with the well-meaning mediation of Norwegian intellectuals/diplomats, seem to have sincerely considered this a constructive procedure.
Vital issues were deliberately left ambiguous, to be eventually settled in a good spirit, after confidence would have been built. It was insufficiently taken into account that implementation would fall into the hands of the very same generals and security chiefs who had been in charge of the occupation and oppression of the Palestinians. And Yitzchak Rabin still was, to a very considerable degree, one of them.
Indeed, it was Rabin who stated that "there are no holy dates" - i.e., that Israel is not bound by any timetable, even one clearly set out in an agreement which Israel formally and solemnly signed - a highly pernicious idea and precedent, which was to have a long and vigorous life after Rabin's own death.
In February 1994, when settler Baruch Goldstein perpetrated the massacre at Hebron's Cave of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque, Rabin refused to authorize the removal of the violent extremist settler enclave of which Goldstein had been part - even though public opinion was ready for it.
It was the Hebron Massacre that provoked Palestinians into taking up the retaliatory method of suicide bombings (few remember now that there had never been such a horror until the day when Goldstein took up a gun and killed 29 Muslim worshippers during their prayer).
Already a year past the historic handshake, Israelis at large started to wonder, "how come that we signed peace and terrorism is worse than ever" (Palestinians were equally indignant about the growth of settlements during a supposed Peace Process).
It should be granted that Rabin did grow into the role that circumstances thrust upon him. With the increase of obstacles and opposition, Rabin became all the more stubborn and determined to continue upon the course which he had embarked, and exhibited a remarkable ability to change his fundamental basic worldview when past the age of seventy.
When deprived of parliamentary majority by the defection of two hawkish Laborites, Rabin could get the Oslo II agreement passed only by relying on the support of Arab Knesset Members.
His doing so was far more radical a step than Oslo II itself, the one and only time in Israeli history when the country's Arab citizens were actually accepted as participants to an important policy decision.
And when asked on the last TV interview of his life "Don't you think that a government relying on Arabs is not legitimate", Rabin answered 'Anybody who says that is a racist', and he sounded angry. (A few years earlier, he would have said that himself...)
The promise of the candle kids
One can only speculate on how much further a living Rabin would have led us. The assassinated Rabin left behind him the myth (larger than life, by definition) of a heroic Peace Maker and Martyr - the kind of potent myth which can power mass political and social forces (as the history of the Catholic Church can amply testify).
There were thousands of young people who sat days and nights around mourning candles, consumed with guilt for "not having been at Rabin's side when he needed us" and determined "not to let peace die."
Such groups as "Dor Shalom" (Peace Generation) appeared out of nothing, to mobilize people in the thousands and tens of thousands and vow to "preserve Rabin's heritage at all costs", running through the streets of Tel Aviv and hanging on every balcony enormous signs reading "A whole Generation Demands Peace." (We now know that eventually this high-minded and idealistic movement disappeared ignominiously back into nothing).
At the time, these energetic young people placed themselves at the disposal of Rabin's successor Shimon Peres, waving the enormous signs under the windows of his apartment: "You will never walk alone, Shimon!" and "Peres will take up Rabin's Torch!" But Peres embarked on a whole series of colossal mistakes, managing at record speed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and lead his supporters to a completely unpredicted elections defeat within a few months.
It is still far from clear what possessed Peres to authorize his security service to assassinate senior Hamas operative Yihya Ayahs in Gaza, when anybody could have predicted that retaliatory suicide bombings would follow precisely before elections. It cost Peres, who had enjoyed extremely favorable polls, some of his electoral base of support at the center of the political spectrum - enough of a loss to lead to defeat by a hair-thin margin.
Still, the elections victory of Binyamin Netanyahu - the man who had relentlessly attacked and vilified Rabin - was an unexpected and painful shock to these youths who had spent days and nights mourning Rabin with lighted candles. It was "The Second Murder of Rabin", by "Netanyahu the demagogue whose incitement caused Rabin to be killed."
Regarding Netanyahu as an usurper, utterly illegitimate as Prime Minister, lent radicalism even to such groups as "The Peace Guards" who gathered every Friday to sing sad old-fashioned songs on the spot where Rabin was murdered.
In September 1997 Netanyahu provoked a major crisis with the Palestinians by unilaterally opening an ancient tunnel in Jerusalem's Old City, which was regarded as threatening the nearby mosques on the Temple Mountain/Haram A Sharif.
After a week's bloody confrontations, in which sixteen Israelis and more than hundred Palestinians were killed, Netanyahu had to backtrack sharply: call off the troops, meet with Arafat in the White House, and promise to withdraw from (part of) Hebron. Netanyahu had no choice when major protest rallies had been held in Tel Aviv, day after day, and opposition leader Shimon Peres lambasted him on CNN for "irresponsibly going to war with only half the country behind him."
The Netanyahu years also saw the return of public attention to the overlooked South Lebanon, where Hizbullah guerrilla war intensified and Israeli soldiers paid with their lives for holding on to the futile "Security Zone."
The Four Mothers Movement came into being, coasting on the enormous reservoir of public sympathy which Israeli society (like other societies at war) has for soldiers and their families.
With amazing speed the issue of Israeli presence in South Lebanon jumped from the back pages to the center of public attention, became the center of the country's most hot controversy. Though the Four Mothers demonstrations were never very large, the prestige and moral standing of soldiers' mothers (and some fathers) more than compensated for that. By the last year of Netanyahu's term, it was no longer such a controversial issue - because a consensus was forming in the Israeli public opinion on the need to "get out of Lebanon as soon as possible."
A sticker that Peace Now at this time distributed in enormous numbers throughout the country read 'Bring Peace Back to Power' - which obviously meant "Bring the Labor Party Back to Power."
All the burgeoning anti-Netanyahu feeling was channeled (fatally, as in hindsight can be said quite unambiguously) towards the Labor Party, "The party of Rabin", and towards the man who claimed Rabin's mantle - Ehud Barak.
Intended failure?
Responsibility for the mess we are in can be shared among many people and many objective factors. Still, if one person can be pinpointed for a major share in the blame, it is Barak (which is why his present quest to regain power is a most sublime act of Chutzpa).
At the beginning of his year and half he had in power Barak left the Palestinians on the back burner, to their considerable frustration, and embarked on intensive negotiations with Syria. These were aimed at reaching peace with both Syria and Lebanon (at that time, very much of a Syrian satellite), at the price of withdrawal from, respectively, the Golan Heights and South Lebanon.
Coming quite far and with only a relatively minor dispute on the precise demarcation of the border, Barak "got cold feet" (as than US Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk put it) due mainly to the effective campaign put up by the Golan settlers and their supporters.
Instead, Barak opted for a precipitous unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon, neither asking for nor gaining peace with that country or with Syria. Hizbullah was left as the great victor and arbiter of Lebanese politics, and a rising force in Middle East politics as a whole.
But in Israeli politics, Barak got the warm congratulations of the Four Mothers - who thereupon disbanded - and of public opinion in general. And he avoided the difficult confrontation with the Golan settlers, who also chalked up a major victory.
Than Barak embarked on what was billed as the effort to end the conflict with the Palestinians once and for all, and set off to meet Arafat and Clinton at Camp David.
Though the right wing partners decamped from his cabinet, he had an enormous reservoir of public support. Opinion polls indicated that a Barak-Arafat agreement was likely to win 60% to 70% support in a referendum (or a similar overall parliamentary strength to the parties supporting the agreement, in case of new elections).
Throughout the tense weeks of Camp David, the Association of Israeli and Palestinian Bereaved Families continually maintained presence in a large tent at Tel Aviv's Rabin Square, calling upon the leaders closeted across the ocean to "Make Peace, so that our Community of the Bereaved would not increase" (they had an all too real premonition of the consequence of failure, though possibly underestimating the terrible toll of bloodshed and suffering which the coming years would see).
The mainstream, mass peace movement was preparing to play the role to which it accustomed since the 1978 Camp David - that of Begin, Sadat and Carter.
A coalition of many groups was formed, holding preparatory meetings at the basement of the Kibbutz Movement House in Tel Aviv and laying detailed campaign plans: hundreds of activists to meet with Barak at the airport and follow him to Jerusalem with a cavalcade of cars; small-scale actions in support of the agreement to be held for several days, at various locations throughout the country - culminating with "The Mother of All Peace Rallies" in Tel-Aviv. Afterwards, peace groups would throw themselves into the struggle to win "a solid peace majority" in the referendum or elections to follow.
Gush Shalom was the most radical participant in this spectrum, willing to suspend its reservations about Barak and the Labor Party - provided that an agreement is indeed achieved.
As we know, all these preparations and detailed plans, laid down with meticulous care, were foredoomed - since the agreement with Arafat was not achieved. Instead, Barak came back with denunciations of Palestinian intransigence and their rejection of his "generous offers."
The enormous peace coalition broke apart instantly. There were those who did not buy the PM's words at face value and pointed out that the "generous offers" were far from truly generous. (But that was an extremely difficult and uphill struggle, especially with Bill Clinton, the President of the United States, speaking on prime-time Israeli TV and confirming Barak's version).
There were those who stuck to the plan of greeting Barak at the airport and following him all the way to Jerusalem - which in these circumstances was no longer the act of peace activists but a direct instigation and encouragement of the carnage to come.
And there were quite a lot in between - who went home in disgust and despair, and many of whom stayed away up to the present.
The peace-minded ordinary people, who for nearly three decades could be relied on to come out in their hundreds of thousands once or twice a year (and sometimes more frequently when the situation clearly demanded it) have disappeared from the streets since that fatal time in 2000. The mass, mainstream peace movement was dealt a grievous blow from which it did not recover to this day.
Enemy building - once more
When Sharon's provocative "visit" to the Temple Mount set off the Second Intifada a month and half later, it was not a matter of gathering a mammoth peace rally or winning a country-wide referendum, but of collecting several hundred people to march through indifferent streets and voice a defiant protest to which Israeli society did not want to listen.
There was none of the sympathy to unarmed Palestinian demonstrators evident at the outbreak of the earlier Intifada in 1987. The army implemented the policy of shooting to kill the "ringleaders", who were usually teenage boys leading their schoolmates in confrontation with the soldiers. This was condoned by various liberal luminaries who wrote that it was "cruel but unavoidable" and that "the Palestinians had brought it upon themselves."
The killing of "ringleaders" was supposed to bring about the end of the Palestinian protest marches and confrontations. Actually - as any sensible person could have predicted, and as cynical generals may well have intended - it caused Palestinians to start using guns, which was answered by Israeli tanks and helicopter gunships shooting and causing gruesome casualties. Which was answered by Palestinian organizations sending suicide bombers into Israeli cities.
It is quite easy to prove - by records reposing abundantly, in black and white, at each and every public library in Israel - that more than half a year passed from the outbreak of the Second Intifada until the first Palestinian suicide bombing, that the Palestinians did try to use methods of mass protest, armed with nothing more than stones, and that they suffered a horrific death toll as a result. And still, the effort of trying to explain this, to any but a small inner circle of activists and intellectuals, would be completely useless and futile.
The image left in Israeli collective memory and taken as fact is: "Barak offered them everything - and they responded with suicide bombers." It was, in effect, a re-enactment of 1947 and 1948, when Palestinian rejection of the UN Partition Plan served as a blanket legitimization, as far as the general Israeli public was concerned, to go to whatever ruthlessness the generals deemed necessary.
Quite soon, Barak lost power - a bit of poetic justice. And Sharon came to power - no longer "The Man You Love to Hate", but "The Wise and Cunning Leader" on which the country wanted to rely in its hour of need.
The radical peace movement was far from muted. There was feverish, intensive activity, day after day, week after week. Protests in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, often ending in clashes with the police; the new Ta'ayush movement, founded jointly by Jewish and Arab Israelis, organized impressive protest convoys to villages besieged by the army, which could easily end with being beaten up by soldiers. A new generation of young refusers defying the military authorities at the court-martial halls and going off to years-long prison terms. Gush Shalom sent letters to officers who violated human rights, threatening them with the Hague International Court - and was itself threatened with prosecution by the Attorney General. Yesh Gvul took up the case to actually lodging complaints in Britain and Spain against various high officers.
What was sorely missing was the larger milieu of mainstream mass demonstrators, who could be one's immediate interlocutors - sometimes engaging in a fierce debate, but still more than once taking up themes and issues from the radicals and making them their own. Peace Now was still there as an extra-parliamentary movement, doing important work in monitoring settlement growth, but their ability to mobilize mass support was fading. Concurrently, the Meretz Party did worse and worse in elections.
And so, Sharon's relentless campaign to trample on the Palestinians culminated in the April 2002 "Operation Defensive Shield", and the West Bank cities re-conquered one by one and kept under continuous curfew for several months, and a terrible toll in lives and destruction at Jenin.
Was Jenin "a massacre" or just "civilians unfortunately caught in a cross-fire"? Did hundreds of Palestinian inhabitants perish, or "only" 54? Mahmoud Bakri's film "Jenin Jenin", trying to bring to the Israeli public some of the Palestinian survivors' points of view, met a nearly unprecedented campaign of hate and intensive attempts at censorship.
Though at last, he gained the freedom to show it wherever and whenever he wanted, few but the already convinced got to see it, others being certain without watching it that it was "nothing but a pack of lies."
Yasser Arafat, who in the Oslo years was elevated to a desirable partner for peace and called "my friend" by none other than Netanyahu, was swiftly and thoroughly re-demonized.
Not only was he once again "The Arch Terrorist" as before 1993, there was the added taint of "treachery" and "false promises", and everything he said was suspected as a lie unless proven otherwise (and there was, in fact, no proof that the Israeli public would accept). Most of the good liberal peacemakers, who had crowded into his waiting room in the 1990's, kept their distance.
Those few Israelis who kept going to Arafat's besieged Ramallah headquarters - reiterating that to make peace one had to talk with the leadership of the other side, as chosen by the other side itself - were ridiculed as "Arafat's Groupies."
On at least two occasions - in May 2002 and again in September 2003 - it was not just a matter of meeting Arafat but of effectively acting as "human shields", when there was a palpable threat of Israeli commandos being sent in to assassinate the Palestinian President.
The tide turns, and turns again
In the second half of 2003 the mainstream of Israeli society started having second thoughts. The army had been given a free rein to do its worst, and did - and, plain to see, after three years of that the Palestinians were still there and no essential problem had been solved. Indeed, there were some of the army's own generals who proved clear-minded enough to think so themselves and courageous enough to say so in public.
And so, there started what looked like a revival of the mainstream peace movement with the conspicuous initiative of "Alternative Diplomacy." The Geneva Agreement presented to the Israeli public a detailed draft agreement, worked out in considerable detail and ceremoniously signed by hundreds of respectable Israelis and hundreds of respectable Palestinians. To a large part of the Israeli public it looked reasonable.
At the same time, there were the new refuser movements, far too close to the mainstream for (Sharon's) comfort. "Courage to Refuse" was founded by officers who served in suppressing the ongoing Intifada and became thoroughly disgusted, and who insisted that 'Refusal to the Occupation is true Zionism'; and the Air Force pilots who refused to go on bombing Palestinian cities; and then the outspokenly dissident commandos of "Sayeret Matkal" - the Israeli Army's "Most elite of all elite units."
As Dov Weisglass, PM Sharon's confidential adviser, later put it in a revealing press interview: "We could not ignore it. These were not crazy hippie kids who paint their hair green; this came from the salt of the earth, the best of the best. We had to do something..."
Weisglass - considered one of the country's most wily business lawyers - provided Sharon with a neat scheme to take the wind out of all these sails: unilateral "Disengagement" from the Gaza Strip. Ariel Sharon, the man who was personally responsible for creating many of the Gaza Strip settlements, willing to dismantle them! News sensational enough to draw all the headlines, arouse enormous debate and discussion, and sweep all other initiatives and actions out of the public mind.
Sharon must have grieved to take this step - but he had spent most of his adult life sending men to war with the knowledge that not all of them would come back alive.
For him, the main objective - keeping and tightening control over "Judea and Samaria" (The West Bank) was worth the gambit of giving up the Gaza Strip. (And not completely giving up control even there, as had become all too clear by now and as observant people could see - and did say - even at the time itself.)
The halfway-recovered peace movement was neatly trapped. The process - from Sharon's first announcement until the final dismantling of the last Gaza settlement - was drawn out (clearly by design) over more than a year and half. During virtually all this time, Disengagement from Gaza became the one and only issue on the Israeli political and public agenda. One was in favor, or against, full stop.
For all of this year and half, the settlers and their National-Religious supporters were intensively mobilized, holding several big rallies and very many small demonstrations - as Sharon, who knew them intimately and shared many of their past campaigns, could and did predict well in advance.
Peace seekers could not fully identify with Sharon the person or with Sharon's Gaza Disengagement Plan, whose defects were so obvious. So, some joined the campaign of hanging Blue Ribbons on cars, to signify support for the disengagement and oppose the settlers' Orange Ribbons. Others tried to have campaigns of their own, Red Ribbons, Black Ribbons, Green Ribbons (without much success), or - turned their back on the issue uppermost in the media and concentrated on the ongoing struggle against the "Separation Fence" at Bil'in and other West Bank villages.
When Peace Now tested its ability to mobilize a mass demonstration in support of the Disengagement, some 10,000 people turned up - which might have been an adequate showing on other occasions.
But since the settlers' hatred of Sharon burned much hotter than the leftists' willingness to support him, they were able to mobilize more than a hundred thousand of their Religious Nationalists at much the same time - and so, the Peace Now effort was ridiculed in the media as a miserable failure. That was the final time that Peace Now - a movement once famed for its ability to organize mass rallies - made any effort in this direction.
Aside from misdirecting the peace movement, the Disengagement saved Sharon from the disagreeable need to renew negotiations with the Palestinians - despite the fact that the much maligned and demonized Arafat has died (in circumstances which remain rather suspect and mysterious, though a direct Israeli involvement was never proven).
His place was taken by the eminently respectable Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), than at the peak of his power and having the backing of a solid parliamentary majority - but unable to get with Sharon into negotiations over the Gaza disengagement. Apparently the situation of chaos, which could have been avoided by a regular handover of the territory, was intentional.
So, the Gaza Settlements were evacuated, without too much fuss and without the massive bloodshed that some predicted or threatened with. The precedent of settlement evacuation actually implemented might be important in the longer range. Even knowing all that followed, one must conclude that it was the lesser evil compared with a settler victory in keeping the Gaza settlements intact - which would have been a proof positive that no settlement could ever be evacuated under any circumstances.
A lesser evil - but an evil, nevertheless. Before sinking into his coma, Sharon had succeeded in neatly replacing direct occupation of Gaza with a suffocating siege, extending settlement activity and construction of the Wall in the West Bank, and making the Geneva Initiative and other conspicuous acts of the peace camp seem relics of the distant past.
Moreover, continued Israeli killing of Palestinian militants on the West Bank provoked Palestinian groups to retaliate by shooting rockets from Gaza at nearby Israeli communities. And resettlement of the former Gaza settlers proceeded most leisurely and ineffectively - due to a very inefficient Israeli government bureaucracy and/or to Machiavelli-ism (on purpose making settlement evacuation look a miserable failure).
Indeed, the Disengagement is nowadays generally considered a failure - and responsibility placed not upon its author, who is now beyond the purview of political discussion and judgment, but on "The Leftists" who wanted the settlements dismantled.
No place in history
And so, after all this long tour into the past, we come back very near to the dismal present.
The career of Ehud Olmert can now be summed up in its entirety.
# Power fell into his hands more or less accidentally.
# He promised to continue Sharon's Disengagement also in the West Bank ("Convergence" was the term he used). In the event, during his entire term he evacuated, with a grand show of a violent confrontation, a grand total of nine (9) houses in one (1) illegal settlement outpost.
# He answered the outcome of Palestinian elections by organizing an international boycott against the occupied Palestinians.
# He grossly overreacted to a Hizbullah provocation, embarked on a full-scale war in which he had every advantage, and managed to lose this war.
# He conducted negotiations that were quite ineffective and never intended to produce results, and did not. At the last moment, he reportedly offered to the Palestinians some 93% of the West Bank - not including Greater Jerusalem - to be handed over at some undetermined time in the next ten years, and on condition that also after these ten years the Israeli army would keep considerable control over the Palestinian outer borders and the right to station forces in the Jordan Valley.
# After nearly two years of a cruel siege of Gaza and military operations costing the lives of hundreds of Palestinians (and a far smaller number of Israelis) Olmert did finally and rather reluctantly conclude a cease-fire with the Hamas government in Gaza. At the time of writing, this ceasefire has been maintained (more or less) for two months and seems likely to continue for some time - which means that at least a hundred people who would have been dead otherwise are still alive now. At least that.
Commemorating peace
Nowadays, the only occasion when peace-minded Israelis can still be gotten out of their homes to gather together in a large rally - as many as a hundred thousand - is the annual Memorial Rally to Rabin, held every November in the Rabin Square of Tel Aviv where he was killed.
Officially, these are non-political memorial events, which is not the truth and nobody takes it seriously. It is a gathering of a particular political camp, on a specific side of the Israeli political spectrum, and people from the other side of the spectrum don't feel comfortable there (and sometimes complain loudly about it).
Yet in one sense, it is a memorial - because quite a large proportion of the participants are coming to mourn, not just Yitzchak Rabin the person but also the things that Rabin stood for, and which in the view of many are dead or dying.
The last time a leader came to one of these gatherings to seriously offer himself as the new Rabin was three years ago. Amir Peretz - just fresh from being elected Labor Party Leader - mounted the podium, delivered a speech worthy of a Martin Luther King, greeting with clapping and cheering.
What he did soon after was so disgraceful, that at least he did not show his face there again a year later. (Which cannot be said of Ehud Barak, who did come there and duly delivered a well-constructed speech, which failed to arouse any applause.)
In theory - very very much in theory - we should have now been resting on our laurels. The Two-State-Solution which was first proclaimed by small daring groups and long denounced as "extremist" and "bordering on treason", has by now been taken up as the acceptable and desirable solution by the whole world, including the political establishment of the State of Israel.
Tzipi Livni, involved in negotiations with Palestinians as Foreign Minister and likely to become the new PM, committed herself explicitly and repeatedly to the program of "two national states for two peoples". But with the obvious discrepancy between the loudness of talking about this idea and the feebleness and insincerity so far of any attempt to actually implement it, more and more of the peace seekers are becoming altogether skeptical about the whole two-states concept.
And the general public is also skeptical: there is a widely held feeling that peace is no longer a thing of the future but belongs to the past - something which was already tried and already failed.
Just as people in the world at large tend to judge "Socialism" by the actual record of the Soviet Union and China more than by nice-sounding writings of Socialist theorists, so do people in Israel in general consider "Peace" as the experiment started by Rabin in 1993 and brought by Barak to a crashing and bloody failure in October 2000, Sharon's Disengagement serving to prove the point once more.
For quite a few people in Israel, that just means that we have to live with the situation as it is, and let the army deal with the Palestinians as best it can. "Managing the conflict rather than trying to solve it" is the new buzzword among "experts."
Beautiful dreams
For their part, quite a few of the radical peace activists take the position that it is the two state solution which has failed and is no longer applicable. That the solution lies now with a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, a democratic state where every person would have a vote and all would live happily together.
It is certainly tempting, a bright and shiny new hope. Far more attractive than clinging to an idea which had been tattered and discredited again and again for the past fifteen years.
Moreover, even at its best the two-state solution contains a built-in moral ambiguity. The state of Israel, which the two state solution is designed to keep intact, was created in savage war, and could not conceivably have been created in any other way. Its continued existence implies acquiescence in injustice and dispossession, at best only very partially to be reversed.
Discarding the two states framework is the only way a sensitive Israeli could aspire to be free of the sense of guilt (short of leaving the country and severing all contact with it). All wrongs to the Palestinians could be righted to one's perfect satisfaction, all refugees come back to the homes they or their forebears were forced to leave, and perfect justice would reign.
So, several hundred activists held a successful conference in Haifa a month ago, heard stirring speeches and resolved unanimously that a single state, common to Israelis and Palestinians, should be set up. And shortly afterwards, Zochrot held a conference in Tel Aviv, concluding with the resolution that all the Palestinian refugees must have the possibility of coming back to where they of their forbears lived before 1948. (Zochrot even managed to lease for this event the Tel Aviv premises of the ZOA - Zionist Organization of America - to the great chagrin of the extreme right ZOA leadership back in the US).
The rub is that the great majority of Jewish Israelis today are not any more inclined to give up the idea of a Jewish state than were their forebears in the 1920's and 1930's, when Martin Buber and Yehuda Magnes put up the idea.
Possibly, even less inclined. First, because the State of Israel has been in existence for sixty years now, and what already exists has a certain inertia.
More importantly, the two peoples of this country have been mortal enemies of each other for nearly a century now. Among Israelis and Palestinians alike, only a handful of very old people who retain a clear memory of their childhood can remember a time when this deadly conflict did not exist.
In quite a few times and places, people have made peace with their "mortal enemies", on the basis of a reasonable compromise. In a good part of these cases, the peace held and the two sides eventually ceased being mortal enemies, or enemies at all.
But there is hardly a case where people embarked on peace by putting their fate into the hands of those "mortal enemies." And that is how most Jewish Israelis are bound to interpret any solution that involves introducing into the citizen body of Israel a number of Palestinians equal to or greater than their own number - whatever the fine principles invoked to justify such a solution.
Ironically, precisely the horror that an average Jewish Israeli (including an average Jewish Israeli politician) feels at any such idea might provide the Palestinians with the leverage they so sorely need in order to move things out of the rut.
Nusseibeh's thunderbolt
A few weeks ago, quite a few people were forced to look up in surprise at the interview given by Sari Nusseibeh in Ha'aretz, where he stated that - should Israel fail to end the occupation in the near future - Palestinians would be forced to give up the idea of a state of their own and ask for Israeli citizenship.
In fact, quite a few prominent Palestinians have raised similar ideas in recent months, the more so as it became clear that there was even less to be expected from "The Annapolis Process" than was the already pessimist opinion on this issue.
Nusseibeh got special attention to being known as the most moderate Palestinian personality. He, unlike nearly everybody else, was willing to stick out his neck and declare his willingness to give up implementation of the Right of Return. His apparent switch to what would seem in Israeli eyes a radical position could be deliberately intended to make Israelis sit up and take notice.
And Palestinians are indeed in sore need of a new strategy. At present they are divided between two mutually hostile rival governments that spend much of their energy to confront each other and provide the occupier with every chance to play one against the other.
The Palestinian Authority increasingly falls into the position of what amounts to collaboration with the Israeli occupation. To nationalist Palestinians - and members of Fatah are very much such - such a position is extremely uncomfortable, tolerable at all only on the assumption that it is a strictly temporary situation leading to the end of the occupation.
Meanwhile, some change of course seems unavoidable.
Israel expects to have either a new Prime Minister forming a new cabinet or go to new elections.
The United States will elect a new President in November and see him enter on his job in January - and the end of George W. Bush's term would imply that the Annapolis process has definitely failed (as was almost universally expected).
Also in January, the end of Abu Mazen's presidential term would legally come; an attempt to lengthen it might throw what remains of the Palestinian political system into severe crisis. Meanwhile Egyptian and Saudi mediators try to restore Hamas-Fatah political cooperation.
Palestinians could reshuffle the cards by making clear that their acceptance of the two-state solution was conditional upon an end to the occupation, and that its indefinite continuation, while occupation and settlement go on relentlessly, cannot be taken for granted. Putting before Israel the option of the one state solution would not get the one state implemented - but it just might give the push needed to turn the two-state solution from empty words into reality.
The Editors
*Leon Zahavi, Apart or Together: Jews and Arabs in Palestine according to the documents of the Comintern (1919-1943), Keter, Jerusalem, 2005 (published in Hebrew).]
The Other Israel, September-October issue
