Indeed, the innovation in these talks — and the source of hope for the future — was that the two sides were able, for the first time, to touch the conflict’s raw nerves — the question of the refugees, the Palestinians’ right of return, the settlements, and the status of Jerusalem.
Touching these nerves led, of course, to the predictable reflex — the body politic instantly jerked and tensed, both peoples’ muscles cramped up, and religious adrenaline flowed into the national bloodstreams.
Numerous Israelis and Palestinians immediately enlisted in the campaign to shore up defenses against the threat of compromise. Both sides promulgated religious rulings, signed by rabbis and Muslim muftis, declaring that there could be no territorial compromise in the land of our forefathers. The Palestinians went even further and announced that any leader who agreed to such a compromise, especially on holy Jerusalem, al-Quds, would be denounced as a traitor — his fate a bullet in the head. The army and the police, in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, were put on alert, and their commanders issued bellicose warnings. Barak’s government was left with almost no ministers who supported his strange eagerness to make peace; and Arafat’s ministers tried to outdo each other with warnings against making any concession. And the result?
The two peoples proved once again that they are still not capable of living together, yet neither are they able to disconnect from each other. They did not have the fortitude to take the final step, the one that would have led to a real metamorphosis in their relations. Even after the extraordinary American effort at mediation they remained in a clench, strangling each other in a double nelson, victims of the cowardly and fanatic way of thinking that so many years of hatred have created. The maps that tried to trace new borders, convoluted and peppered with enclaves, demonstrated to all the impossible snarl of the current situation, resembling a divorce agreement between a husband and wife who must continue to live out their lives in the same apartment, and sometimes even in the same bed.
II
We do not know yet what actually happened in the negotiating rooms, who conceded and who refused to concede. We have the exceptional testimony of President Clinton himself, according to which Barak was more flexible and more daring. But the Palestinians will, of course, claim the opposite.
Despite the reservations the Israeli left has about Ehud Barak’s somewhat military vision of peace, and about his attitude toward the Palestinians during the negotiations, it should be stated unequivocally that no previous Israeli leader has been so determined and decisive in seeking to make peace, and so bold in the concessions he was offering to achieve it. But did Barak really go the whole possible distance? Did he really, as he claimed, “turn over every stone” in his efforts to compromise? On the other hand, had he dared turn over even one more “holy” stone — for example, by ceding the Palestinians sovereignty over a significant part of East Jerusalem — would he have been able to win the Israeli people’s approval of the agreement in the referendum he has promised? Is Israeli society ready for such a move?
Another question nagging all those who wanted this summit to succeed: Did Barak have a real partner at Camp David for his far-reaching moves? True, there is no symmetry between the concessions the two sides can make. Israel holds almost all the cards, while the Palestinians have more restricted options. Nevertheless, there is no escaping the sense that Arafat was the less bold, less creative, and more stubborn of the two leaders. Even one who has great sympathy for the long suffering and the impossible position of the Palestinians cannot avoid the impression that Arafat was at fault this time in his analysis of the situation, as he has been more than once in the past.
Had Arafat shown any flexibility at all on the question of Jerusalem, he might have succeeded in getting Barak to take even larger strides, in the end breaking through the psychological snare that now paralyzes the entire process. Had Arafat been freer of the pressures exerted by the extremists among his people, and of the pressure of other Arab leaders, perhaps he would have avoided the scenario that now casts its shadow over many in Israel — the likelihood that the extremists on the right will gain power and Benjamin Netanyahu return to the political arena. If such developments occur, it will be almost impossible to achieve peace in the future.
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But perhaps what is required is superhuman courage of a kind that the two leaders are not yet ready for. This they must have in order to dare change anything fundamental in their attitudes toward Jerusalem.
I wonder whether anyone who is not part of the local drama, and who observes it only from outside, can really appreciate the force of the emotions, the yearnings, and the compulsions that the old city of Jerusalem rouses in those who live in or around it. It is an area of less than a square kilometer, but it is so charged with history, myth, memory, wars, and the profound essence of so many cultures and of the three major religions, that it has become a kind of black hole of incredibly dense mass that threatens to suck the whole region into it.
Despite this, Ehud Barak became the first Israeli leader to agree to put Jerusalem on the table. Barak did this, and Arafat was not prepared, or able, to make any move toward him. Barak withstood enormous pressure from his own people, yet he did not rule out flexibility or a re-examination of ossified historical positions. Arafat turned him away with a categorical refusal. In this, Arafat bears greater responsibility for the summit’s failure.
But the minute that the Jerusalem question was made a subject of negotiation, many Israelis dared come out of the closet and admit that Israel’s claim of the “sanctity of united Jerusalem” is but an empty slogan. Jerusalem has never been united. Two hostile nations live within it. They maintain largely separate social and government institutions. Suddenly, in the past week, many Israelis discovered the huge gap between the authentic, real core of historical and religious Jerusalem, about which our forefathers dreamed throughout thousands of years of exile, and real-life Jerusalem. The latter contains twenty-six Palestinian villages that Israeli governments annexed to the city for political reasons. They then began swearing in its name and endowing it with the sanctity of biblical Zion.
This past week I visited some of those villages, together with minister of justice Yossi Beilin. I sought to discover whether they create any sort of religious frisson in me. Does any sort of national, historic shiver run through me that would testify to my connection with these places? When my grandfather in Warsaw closed his eyes and directed his heart to Jerusalem, did his soul long for the Palestinian village of Wallageh? Was it for the Qalandia refugee camp that the twelfth-century Jewish poet Yehuda Halevy yearned from distant Spain: “The savor of your soil delights my mouth like honey”?
I felt nothing. I discovered what I had long known: the boundaries of Jewish-Israeli identity actually need much less Jerusalem than what the municipal boundaries contain. The question is only whether Israel will — as its right-wingers demand — put up its future as collateral in order to battle for such an illusory identification with this manipulative Jerusalem, or whether Israelis can now define for themselves what their true spiritual, security, and religious interests are — and strive for them alone.