I am familiar with the Palestinian responses to these claims. I agree with some of them. Yes, the Israelis don’t honor agreements. And the Israeli military presence in the occupied territories is violent. There are also the settlements, the areas sealed by the army, and the siege. As well as the brutal military response against stone throwing.
I write these lines and feel the depressing futility of repeating arguments that are so familiar to all of us. What is the point of beating round the bush along the familiar path of recrimination, when hundreds of innocent people, Palestinians and Israelis, are being killed? What is the point, in the current situation, of trying to determine who is guilty or who started it all? All of us, Israelis and Palestinians, are participants, to one extent or another, in the tragedy that has come upon us. But there’s one thing that can’t be doubted despite all this fear and confusion: If the leadership on both sides is not truly courageous, Jewish and Palestinian children will continue to kill each other, and we, their parents, will send them to die (and we’ll then charge each other with “making use of children”).
The al-Aksa Intifada has, with great force, brought Palestinian pain, humiliation, and anger to the surface. The entire world and, within it, many Israelis also now understand that the Oslo agreements must be reopened and that a new peace agreement, a fairer and bold one, must be drafted. Such an agreement will present difficult challenges to both peoples, perhaps too difficult to bear. Both sides will have to give up concrete and important assets. Both will also have to give up the delusions and illusions that have accounted for their strength and hope and national consciousness.
Every rational person understands that continuing violence, on both sides, is liable to send the region into disaster, into a historical tragedy whose outcome no one can now predict. Neither Israelis nor Palestinians will come out of it well. Maybe only the extremists among both peoples want it. They, in the final analysis, are the true enemies of the majority on both sides.
The Palestinians who signed the open letter to the Israeli public, and the many other Palestinians and Israelis who believe in what I have written here, can still hold discussions among themselves. Of course they are not authorized to conduct negotiations, but at least they have the power to renew the dialogue. Perhaps we will be able to find creative and just solutions at the points where the politicians — for a variety of reasons — are not able to rise above their short-term needs.
As an Israeli who seeks peace, I ask: Can we meet — yes, even in these times — on the border, both the metaphorical and the concrete demarcation, somewhere between Palestine and Israel, say, in a peace tent that we erect there together? Can we present an alternative of any sort to the rampant animosity, hatred, killing, and revenge? Can we halt the mad, violent whirlwind that threatens to sweep up all of us?
Here, this is an invitation to dialogue.
Point of No Return
January 2001
A major point of contention between Palestinians and Israelis continues to be the “right of return” of the Palestinian refugees. About 800,000 people who fled or were expelled from Palestine during the 1948 War of Independence between the newly established state of Israel and four Arab countries were kept by the Arab states in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, the Jordanian West Bank, and the Egyptian-ruled Gaza Strip. After the Six-Day War, when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza, the refugees in those territories came under Israeli control. The ongoing dispute over Israel’s responsibility for the creation of the refugee problem has not been resolved, and no solution has been found. The number of Palestinian refugees today is estimated at 5.5 million people around the world.
The “right of return” has been a central Palestinian demand for the last fifty-two years. Yet only in recent weeks has it penetrated Israeli consciousness as a concrete and threatening possibility. It now looks as if the Palestinian insistence on the “right of return” will lead even the most steadfast of Israeli doves — myself included — to the reluctant and disheartening conclusion that peace cannot be achieved at this time.
Many Israelis live with an inner conflict between their moral and natural desire to repair a decades-old injustice and their profound apprehensions about the “right of return.” The prospect of the return of the Palestinian refugees, who fled or were expelled from Israel during and after the War of Independence, confronts every Jewish Israeli with the most problematic roots of Israel’s definition of itself as the Jewish state. The Jewish majority’s explicit desire to retain its numerical superiority is one that, when it comes down to it, beats in the heart of every nation. Every nation wishes to preserve its values and heritage and pass them on to the generations to come; such an aspiration is neither jingoistic nor racist. In the case of the Jewish people, with their tragic history, it is even more comprehensible, although it remains an unresolved discrepancy in the democracy they desire.
In my view, accepting the Palestinian demand would be a dangerous move for Israel as a Jewish state, and as a political entity. Israel must accept its partial responsibility for the refugee problem, alongside the Arab countries that created the problem in 1948. Israel must help raise the funds to resettle the refugees, and must allow some refugees to return for purely humanitarian reasons. Likewise, Israel must recognize the refugees’ bonds to the places they were torn away from. But there is a great distance between an affinity to a place and the “right to return” there.
The Palestinians have been trying to reassure Israelis by explaining that even if the agreement refers to the “right of return,” it will be only a formal right. In practice, they say, “only” a few hundred thousand refugees will resettle inside Israel (where there are today 5 million Jews and a million Palestinians). I don’t understand this distinction. A right is a right, and if a right is granted, it exists, in full. Anyone with a sense of responsibility for the generations to come must today consider how, fifty years from now, his great-grandchildren will explain to the great-grandchildren of today’s refugees that the “right of return” that Israel recognized was only a theoretical one, a formality.
For decades the Israeli peace camp, together with the Palestinian peace camp, has worked to disseminate the concept of “two states for two peoples.” In other words, a Palestinian national state that will live in security and peace alongside the state of Israel, the Jewish national state. Yet the demand for a sweeping “right of return” will lead, in practice, to a situation in which the Palestinians have a national state, Palestine, while Israel becomes, instead of a Jewish state, a Jewish and Palestinian state — in other words, a political entity whose identity will gradually become blurred.
Jewish villages and cities have been built during the last fifty years on the ruins of the villages in which the Palestinian refugees once lived. This is a heartrending fact for the refugees, but changing it would require tearing millions of Jews away from their homes, and to where? Let us not forget that the great majority of these Jews are themselves members of refugee families who fled ancestral homes in Europe and the Islamic world. Will committing yet another injustice bring the two peoples closer to peace?
“What do you mean?” my Palestinian friends ask me when we blow up at each other during arguments, time after time, over this issue. “If Israel accepts the principle of the ‘right of return,’” they argue, “and the refugees indeed return, an entirely new reality will be created here, a reality of conciliation and mutual forgiveness, a reality of true peace.”