And are you over there, beyond the present wall of alienation, aware that among us you can still hear, even after all that has happened, voices that insist on questioning whether Israel indeed did every thing for peace, and what is the real nature of the peace that we imposed on the Palestinians, and whether we did not again fail by viewing reality through our spectacles of bottomless fear, our permanent blind spot? (But, after all, it is an eminently justifiable fear, a voice shouts within me, because in the face of all that we have seen, it is all so rational to fear!) I know that it is impossible to compare the limitations that you are subject to, to the freedom of expression that I have here, in Israel. The worst thing that can happen to me if I express an opinion that is far off the consensus is that someone will write a venomous article against me. But you might be physically harmed. But I so much want to hear, at this hour, in a private conversation, what you are thinking now.
If it’s at all possible to think now as the riots rage outside, and inside. All day — arguments. I drive my car and argue with myself. Friends testify that even in bed, with their spouses, they talk almost solely about politics. The human spirit cringes. I also realize that for every argument I make, I have an incontrovertible counterargument. The situation is so complex and unavoidable that suddenly even opinions I always opposed suddenly bear an ominous attraction. People accost me angrily in the street. Everything you believed in was just a dream, they say. You can’t make peace with the Palestinians. How can you believe Arafat, who has already signed four agreements in which he committed himself to refrain from the use of violence? How can you believe beasts like those who lynched the soldiers? What a horrible, criminal blunder it was to give the Palestinians weapons, with which they are now shooting and killing us.
I don’t know how it is with you, but here close friends, and even relatives, who always believed in peace, and hoped that most of the Palestinians were undergoing a similar process, now feel truly brokenhearted and betrayed. What was the point of offering Arafat so much, of compromising even on Jerusalem, when he encourages such violence, when there is no certainty that he can control his people, and when the schools and mosques of the Palestinian Authority continue to teach and preach the destruction of Israel?
And beyond that, Israelis say today — you can hear it everywhere — even if we give the Palestinians everything, all the territories, and evacuate the settlements and even hand over all of East Jerusalem — the following day they’ll want the rest of Jerusalem and Haifa and Jaffa. They’ll always find a new pretext for violence, for nurturing their hatred and their yearning to throw us into the sea. I have my own answers to those questions, nowadays somewhat more hesitant. I still believe there’s truth in these answers, but I feel how weak this reasoning is, in light of the fire and the fury of hatred.
*
Suddenly, in an impulse of despair, out of isolation, and in protest of the situation that prevents me from doing something so simple and natural, I call you.
You recognize my voice at once, and I hear your relief. We speak for a long time. Your family is unharmed, but the little boy next door was killed. I tell you that bullets were fired tonight on the Jerusalem neighborhood where my brother lives. We both still observe a kind of symmetry, a balance in our reporting, which of course balances nothing, nor does it comfort; despite it all, we are still representatives. You sound agitated and beyond hope — I have never heard you sound this way. It is a nightmare, you say, never has the situation been as awful, and there is no way of knowing how it will end. You blame Israel. The way it dragged out the negotiations for years, far beyond what was agreed on at Oslo. You speak of the impossibility of reaching peace without evacuating the settlements. About how Israel humiliated the Palestinians in the negotiations, and then went so far as to demand that they consider intra-Israeli political problems, while completely ignoring Arafat’s shaky position. Israel tried to impose peace on him under conditions that no Palestinian, even the most moderate, would accept.
I agree with you that the way Israel conducted the peace process was faulty, aggressive, hostage to profound Israeli fears, and unable to empathize with the Palestinian point of view. For years I’ve thought that the peace agreement itself, as it was engineered in Oslo, was the product of brusque Israeli dictation, and that the reality it was meant to create was not going to ensure neighborly relations. Despite that, I say, look at the change that has taken place in Israel with regard to peace since the Oslo process began, especially in the past year, under Barak’s administration. Can you deny the man’s courage, his willingness — which astounded and incensed many Israelis — to hand over most of the occupied territories to you, and to give up parts of Jerusalem, the innermost heart of the Jewish people? Don’t you know, as I do, that a generation’s worth of years will pass before there is another Israeli leader who is both so courageous and able to retain the confidence of the Israeli people in his defense policy? And if you miss this opportunity, you’ll find yourselves facing Sharon (and we, too, I think to myself, we too will find ourselves in that dangerous position).
You are familiar with my arguments and respond to them with your arguments, which are familiar to me. It is as if both of us have to quote them repeatedly, are trapped within them, and feel that our positions never completely comprehend the whole dilemma. There’s always that humiliating sensation that we — the Israeli and the Palestinian — are nothing but a pair of actors sentenced to acting on stage, generation after generation, a grotesque and bloody tragedy whose denouement no one can write, a scene that would offer a hope of relief, of the lifting of the curse.
What frightens me, you say, is that the debate now is not only between governments, or between our armies and police, but between the peoples, the civilians. And the worst is that after Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, it has once more become a feral, tribal, and religious battle.
It seems to me that the situation deteriorated not with Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, which was, in and of itself, provocative and malicious, but rather when Arafat announced three months ago at Camp David that he could not sign a compromise agreement on Jerusalem. He represents, he said then, not only 5 million Palestinians but also the world’s billion Muslims. At that moment, to my mind, the possibility of a solution eluded us, and it turned into a religious conflict. You and I know that religious fanaticism, whether Jewish or Muslim, is your and my real enemy. Neither you nor I can live our lives as we desire under an extremist religious regime. In the end, the relevant borders for most Israelis and Palestinians are not only those between the two peoples, for all their importance, but those between the moderates and extremists on both sides. That should be one of our major motives for reaching a compromise, at almost any price, in order to weaken the religious forces that are growing so strong now.
But we cannot accept the solutions you are offering us, you say — there can be no peace with the settlements, there can be no peace when what we finally get, after such a long struggle, is a tiny state without control of our water sources and most of our territory, a state crosscut by hundreds of Israeli roads and roadblocks. There can be no peace when every time I open my blinds in the morning I see the settlement on the mountaintop that looms over me. Do you know that the settlers call me every night and demand that I leave my city? They, who only twenty years ago settled here by force.