Without minimizing Israel’s responsibility for the deterioration and without ignoring the immense suffering that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinians during thirty-five years of occupation, I feel today that it is the Palestinians who have brought about the current intolerable escalation. It is the outcome of their choice to use the weapon of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.
We must recognize this in order to be able to deal with the new situation we are facing. The suicide bombings have injected into an already complex conflict an element that is irrational, insane, inhuman from any perspective, immoral in a way that we have never yet seen, even in this grubby conflict. Suicide bombings are a weapon that no one in the world knows how to confront. Its use, on such a large scale as to make it almost routine, is liable to lead to extremely dangerous Israeli responses.
Today, as the Israeli army besieges Arafat’s office, as another terrorist makes his way — of this we can be certain — to an Israeli street, to another bus or shopping mall. At this very hour, as in a scene from a convoluted epic novel, full of reversals, two men face off against each other. These are the leaders of the two nations, Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat, two cunning old men, ultimate survivors, and grand masters of a strange game of chess in which they cause the most damage and loss to their own pieces.
Twenty years after Sharon trapped Arafat in Beirut in the Lebanon War of 1982, and after Arafat slipped away to Tunis — striding along the dock at Beirut, on the crosshairs of an Israeli sniper forbidden to shoot him — the two are facing off again.
The sordid reality that the two of them have created for their public is in their own image. Each of them has “succeeded”—each in his own way, each in accordance with the influence he has wielded over the years — in fanning the flames of violence, hatred, and despair among their peoples. Their opponents say that they have no policy and no vision beyond the will to survive. But look how today’s situation is the inevitable outcome of their chosen paths, their deeds, their aspirations, and how much the present state of affairs reflects their warlike, suspicious, and aggressive view of the world. For them it confirms, in a hermetic, circular way, just how right they have always been.
Sharon and Arafat have together, in a collaboration that makes the skin crawl, complicated politics to the point that it has turned to war, have spread despondency of any possibility of dialogue, have brought the situation to such an extreme that their people will be seduced into believing that there really is no choice but to fight against and kill each other.
Now each of them plays the role he has perfected over decades. One is the superwarrior, a sort of gigantic military relic of the new Jewish history. The other is the persecuted, isolated, besieged martyr, wallowing in the desolation from which he knows how to draw a startling strength and forcefulness.
Both of them will fail, apparently, just as they have failed in the past. Sharon won’t succeed in eradicating terrorism. Even if he captures all its planners and strategists, even if he confiscates all the large quantities of weapons that the Palestinians now possess, he will not succeed in excising from the hearts of the Palestinians the impetus to act violently. That is their despair, their sense of humiliation, and their hatred of Israel. His measures will only enhance all these and encourage further waves of terror that will make Israel’s position even more precarious.
Arafat will not, apparently, get what he wants, which is to draw the Arab countries into the conflict. They fear, no less than Israel, the internal unrest that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict causes, and fear even more the Islamic religious extremism that Arafat encourages and that is liable to harm them from within. The world will, apparently, continue to abandon Israel and the Palestinians to kill each other.
More seriously, Arafat’s gambits, the encouragement he gives to the suicide bombers, his grotesque hope, as he recently stated, to himself be “a suicide bomber, a martyr, on the way to Jerusalem,” only pushes the establishment of a Palestinian state further into the distance.
Evil things are happening to both peoples. Fear causes no less damage to the soul than explosives cause to the body. Israeli society is becoming more violent, aggressive, and racist, and less democratic. Palestinian society is undergoing an even more dangerous process. A society that becomes accustomed to sending its young men and women on suicide operations aimed at murdering innocent civilians, a society that encourages such actions and glorifies their perpetrators, will pay a price in the future. Its coin will be their attitude toward life itself, life as an inalienable sacred value. It will also be paid in a more practical way — the minute the possibility of such a horrifying action is formulating in the consciousness of a nation, it will not disappear. It will rear its head again in the people’s internal affairs. It is not at all surprising that moderate Palestinians are no less alarmed by the suicide bombers than Israelis are. They know the bitter truth — the weapon of suicide, which has proved itself so effective against the Israelis, is liable to be used against them as well, when the Palestinians have a state and commence their internecine struggles over the character and image of that state.
That’s the way things are right now. It’s a situation of despair and disintegration. How can we get out of it? Palestinian terrorist attacks will, unfortunately, continue for a long time to come. But if there is also, concurrently, a move toward peace, a process of concessions, of ending the occupation, of conciliation and recognition of the suffering incurred by the other side, there is room for the hope that the Palestinian public’s support for terror will decline, and the Israeli public’s confidence in a peaceful resolution of the conflict will grow. Is there a chance that this might happen? Every thinking person realizes that Arafat and Sharon are incapable of creating this opportunity. What remains? To live through this nightmare to its end, to go from funeral to funeral, and to try to survive each passing moment. Thoughts of peace, of mutual understanding, of coexistence between the two peoples now sound like the last signals of life from a ship that has already sunk.
This War Cannot Be Won
June 2002
When the bus exploded in the morning rush hour in southern Jerusalem, the sound was heard miles away in other parts of the city. Most of the victims were residents of the neighborhood of Gilo, often targeted by Palestinian snipers. A few of the dead and the wounded were Arab Israeli college students. Arafat made a statement to the Palestinian people the next day, demanding a halt to attacks on Israeli civilians, because such attacks give the Israeli government “the excuse to reoccupy our land.”
Another victory for madness: A moment before President Bush was to make a speech declaring his support for a Palestinian state, a Palestinian suicide-murderer of the Hamas faction blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem. He killed nineteen civilians and wounded seventy, including children on their way to school. Black plastic body bags were laid out in a row on the sidewalk, one next to the other.
This row of bodies also postponed significantly the Palestinians’ chances of attaining their own state. Despite this, according to a survey published yesterday in the Palestinian Authority, 80 percent of the Palestinian public supports continued terrorist attacks against Israelis. If that’s the case, we must conclude that the Palestinians are now doing everything necessary to ensure that they will never have their own country.
At the same time, the Israeli government is being pushed into a corner. Shackled to its aggressive, mechanical, one-dimensional way of thinking, it immediately declares an escalated response. From now on, the government declares, the Israeli Army will reoccupy areas of the Palestinian Authority following every attack on Israel. Only this time, the army will not withdraw quickly — it “will instead remain in them until terrorism ceases.”