Gradually, Israelis and Palestinians are moving further away from peace. Just three months ago, in February 2001, at the talks in Taba, an agreement was imminent. Today that looks like a remission, brief and delusional, in the course of an incurable disease. Now almost no one uses the word “peace.” The Palestinians say they won’t end their violence “until the occupation is completely over.” Israel declares that it will not even enter negotiations “until violence comes to a complete halt.” Each side knows that its ultimatum — even if morally correct — is unrealistic. Furthermore, both know that if they adhere to these demands they will be caught in continuous violence and that finally they will bring destruction on themselves. The occupation will go on, and the violence will not end (quite the opposite!). In any case, with a kind of numbing of the senses, they do nothing to save themselves from this nightmare.
Since there is no hope, Israelis and Palestinians go back to doing what they do — shedding the blood of each other. Each day more people join the ranks of the dead and wounded, of the haters and the despondent. Each day the appetite for revenge grows. The Palestinians say, before camera and microphone, that they no longer care if there is never an agreement. “The main thing is for the Israelis to suffer as we have suffered.” Israelis demand that Prime Minister Sharon “rub out a few Palestinian villages” and believe, so it seems, that this will make the Palestinians surrender and agree to an Israeli compromise.
Senior Palestinian officials, who in private conversations with Israelis severely criticize Arafat and the blind slaughter committed by suicide bombers, close ranks with the most extreme elements in their society when they speak in public. The voice of Israel’s left wing has gone almost completely mute — many have given up and have decamped to the right, while others realize that their views just don’t resonate with the public at large. Indeed, what influence can ideas and words have in the face of the brutal, all-pervasive reality that eats away at hope like acid?
Instead of pursuing what Arafat likes to call “the peace of the brave,” both sides are busy keeping a bloody, you-killed-me-I’ll-kill-you balance sheet. The principal objective is to avenge yesterday’s murder while minimizing the enemy’s retaliation tomorrow. Without noticing it, Palestinians and Israelis are reverting to the pattern of an ancient tribal vendetta, eye for eye and tooth for tooth.
It makes one suspect that the two peoples prefer to preoccupy themselves with this cruel ritual rather than really solve the problem at its roots. On second thought, it’s easy to understand (especially for anyone who lives here). “They give birth astride of a grave,” Samuel Beckett wrote in Waiting for Godot, and in the Middle East this description is terribly concrete: all of us, Israelis and Palestinians, were born into this conflict, and our identity is formulated, to no small extent, in terms of hostility and fear, survival and death. Sometimes it seems as if Israelis and Palestinians have no clear identities without the conflict, without the “enemy,” whose existence is necessary, perhaps critical, to their sense of self and community.
You become queasy these days listening to that unique form of self-directed Schadenfreude that fills Israeli and Palestinian leaders when their angry prophecies come true, in particular as a result of their own failings. They especially like to watch hope collapsing before their eyes. No less shocking is the enthusiasm with which so many Israelis and Palestinians adopt these despairing visions. When it comes down to it, so it seems, people get used to the injustices history has inflicted upon them, to the point that they forget what they are allowed to yearn for.
Sharon and Arafat are both cynical leaders. Their consciousnesses were shaped in war and violence, and their actions mirror each other like a carefully choreographed ceremonial dance. In order to achieve a compromise, both will have to renounce most of the fundamental concepts that have molded their worldviews and that have given them their standing among their peoples. Their actions in recent months make one suspect that they are deliberately making negotiations conditional on demands that have no chance of being met today. They direct government and society, including the media (which in the Palestinian Authority is mobilized to achieve the regime’s goals, and is also significantly mobilized in Israel as well), in order to divert the citizenry’s attention from the main issues and to create hostility toward the people of the other side.
As things look now, only a miracle or catastrophe will change the situation. If you don’t believe in the first and fear the latter, you realize that the only practical hope for saving Israel and the Palestinians from mutual slaughter is heavy international pressure on both of them. I still believe that Israel has the obligation to make the larger concessions in negotiations, because it is stronger, and because it is the occupier. But both sides must immediately end their uncompromising rhetoric and reduce their violent actions to the bare minimum, in order to resume negotiations. Another, more minute hope is for the willingness of individuals, Israelis and Palestinians, to renew open dialogue among them. This is not easy to do, but if such contacts take place, they will be of huge and not merely symbolic importance. They will remind both nations of what they must long for. They will create the only alternative to hatred and despair.
International Intervention, Please
June 2001
On June 1, 2001, after a particularly bloody period of constant terrorist attacks on Israelis inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza, a suicide bomber detonated himself in the middle of a large crowd of young Israelis outside a discotheque on the Tel Aviv beach. Most of the victims were Russian emigrants, many of them teenage girls. Under immense international pressure and a cry for restraint on both sides, Arafat publicly condemned the attack and promised to control his militias. The Israeli government threatened that if there were not an immediate end to terror, harsher military measures would be taken against the Palestinians.
Twenty-one boys and girls were murdered yesterday in a suicide attack committed by a Palestinian at a discotheque in Tel Aviv. Dozens more were seriously injured. Boys and girls of fourteen or slightly older. Two of them were sisters. None of them was a soldier. They bore no arms. They were children who had come to a birthday party.
This time the bomb was especially evil — besides the explosives, it contained hundreds of heavy ball bearings. Their effect on a human body is terrifying. Yesterday, when the attack was reported in the media, Palestinians went out into the streets of their cities and fired their rifles in the air to celebrate. Even in terms of the cruel dosages of violence that we have become accustomed to in recent years, this attack crossed a boundary. The international community seems to be beginning to comprehend the depth of the hatred and despair among both peoples, and their inability to free themselves from the trap they have so foolishly entered.