On the other side, Arafat. This is the Arafat who, when notified by Israel that there is a sophisticated explosives factory in Nablus, confiscates the explosives and immediately releases the terrorists. Arafat, who speaks ceaselessly about his opposition to terror but who refuses, out of cowardice and shortsightedness, to finally instigate a courageous battle against the terrorist elements in the Palestinian Authority. He doesn’t understand that it is they who will bring an end to his great dream, and perhaps to himself, too.
How can we bring to a halt this madness in which we are becoming blind, becoming filled with anxiety and despair, forgetting that on the other side there are, at this moment, people like us, anxious and despairing. In other words, how can we make Arafat talk less and do more, and how can we bring Israel to do less and talk more?
In the days to come, Israel will apparendy launch a massive military offensive. The Palestinians will respond with even more terrorist attacks. It’s amazing how the Israelis and Palestinians never turn off this path, the path of violence. The bungled Oslo Accords are, for most Israelis and Palestinians resounding proof that they can never again walk the path of peace.
It is now 3 p.m. I note the hour because there’s no way of knowing what will happen after I send this article off. I have already written so many articles at moments like these, after attacks, before attacks. I’ve tried so many times to understand, to explain, and to find the logic behind the actions of both sides. What I feel like doing now is not writing an article. I actually feel like taking a can of black spray paint and covering every wall in Jerusalem, Gaza, and Ramallah with graffiti: LUNATICS, STOP KILLING AND START TALKING!
Turning a Blind Eye
December 2001
The U.S. Middle East envoy, General Anthony Zinni, left the region on December 16, 2001, after failed attempts to broker a cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians. During Zinni’s three weeks in Israel, over a hundred Israelis and Palestinians were killed in a resurgence of hostilities. An earlier shooting attack by Palestinian terrorists on an Israeli bus in the West Bank settlement of Emmanuel, which killed ten and wounded dozens, provoked Israeli air strikes in retaliation. Sharon announced that the Israeli government was breaking off all ties with Tasir Arafat, who was at the time under personal siege by the Israeli Army in his headquarters in Ramallah.
Six months ago the journal Nature published a study about a dangerous mechanism in the human visual system. The study sought to explain why the brain sometimes refuses to see what the eyes take in and convey to it. The scientists, from Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, suggested that the explanation for this phenomenon is that the brain is flooded with a multitude of interpretations of every reality it faces and that it must, in the end, decide in favor of one of them and act accordingly. The fascinating part of this explanation is the hypothesis that, from the moment the brain decides in favor of a given interpretation of the images it is receiving from the eyes, all stimuli that support any other interpretation simply disappear. The brain, as it were, refuses to incorporate them.
In the impossible relationship between Israel and the Palestinians, both sides have for years suffered from almost complete blindness to the complexity of the situation. Each is certain that the other side is ceaselessly deceiving it; that the other side does not want peace at all; that any compromising move by the other side is camouflage for an intrigue designed to bring that side victory and the elimination of its opponent.
Despite all that, early this week, at an army roadblock near Ramallah, several dozen of us, peace activists from both sides, gathered. In the middle of the chaos of hundreds of backed-up and churning vehicles, of people trying uselessly to leave or enter their city, in the face of the shouting and cursing of Palestinians who oppose this desperate initiative to bring people together, Yossi Beilin, one of the fathers of the Oslo agreement, and Yasir Abd Rabbo, the Palestinian Minister of Information and Culture and a close associate of Yasir Arafat, called for a swift resumption of dialogue. Or at least acceptance of American envoy Anthony Zinni’s proposal for a forty-eight-hour cease-fire.
The rest is well known. Neither side honored the cease-fire. Many Israelis and Palestinians did not survive even these mere forty-eight hours. Wednesday night, after an especially bloody attack by Hamas, the Israeli government issued an odd and equivocal statement: Arafat was irrelevant; he was blotted out of the picture. This meant, actually, that the Palestinian people had also been blotted out, along with their justified desires and aspirations. And so any tiny chance for talks, for an agreement, for a more tolerable future, was also blotted out.
A person stands before this reality and his heart breaks, in seeing how the fears and suspicions and worldviews of naysayers succeed, in the end, in proving themselves in the most destructive way possible. How endless malicious, mistaken, suspicious acts by each side have connected one link to the next in an ostensibly logical continuum — logical in the distorted terms of the conflict — until, all at once, it becomes clear how we have ourselves, with our bare hands, garroted our own necks with a bloody chain of violence.
And it could have been otherwise. One can sketch a picture of more merciful circumstances. One’s thoughts skip quickly back. Had Jordan’s King Hussein responded to Moshe Dayan’s invitation to call him, immediately after the 1967 War, to discuss peace between the two countries; had Israel initiated, in talks it held with the Palestinians in the 1970s and 1980s, a bold settlement that would have linked Israel, Jordan, and Palestine in a federation; had Sharon, when he was minister of defense in 1982, not tried to evict Arafat from Lebanon to Tunis but rather allowed him to return to the occupied territories as a leader; had Israel addressed the first Intifada, in 1987, as a Palestinian cry of distress, and tried to respond accordingly rather than simply to repress it; had Yitzhak Rabin not been assassinated; had Hamas suicide bombers not killed hundreds of Israelis in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in 1995 and 1996, thus helping Benjamin Netanyahu win the prime ministership; had Ehud Barak negotiated at Camp David with greater wisdom and sensitivity; had Arafat had the good judgment to realize the magnitude of the Israeli concessions on offer and not turned so quickly onto the path of violence in September 2000; had Sharon not gone to the Temple Mount; had Arafat truly fought terrorism and not tried to fool the whole world; had …
As the list grows longer, a bitter feeling wells up, that perhaps there really was no other way. That the two nations still are not ready for peace. That neither of them even comprehends what peace means. That even if they know, in theory, how to talk about the “need for peace,” they do not have the strength to go through the profound and painful processes required to bring it about and make it successful. A small number, much too small a number, are still capable of the mental and emotional effort that the complexity of the situation requires. Within the dread that I sense around me, at times I hear a sigh: “Let it end already, one way or another, even in war, but things simply cannot go on as they are now!”
This morning, in the face of the events coming one on the heels of the other, there is no escaping this conclusion: The Israeli brain and the Palestinian brain, which have never known a single day of real peace, have been conditioned to perceive one, unambiguous picture of reality — that of the unending war, of the one-dimensional, stereotypical, monolithically hating, violent enemy.
Yet, even now, more than at any other time, we cannot give up the idea of peace. Attempts at peace, even if they sometimes seem, as I know they do, pathetic, even virtual, are of huge importance in preserving some link between those Israelis and Palestinians who agree that there is no solution other than a political solution. But we must recognize, with much grief, that at this point there is no chance for a political settlement between the two sides. I don’t think I have to explain what that implies.