Too many unilateral moves have been made here. Too many acts of political and military force and coercion. The unilateral establishment of a wall will bring a new and dangerous nadir in this process. A wall would allow the extremists — who are all too numerous — to argue that there would be no one to talk to in the future, either. A wall would allow stereotypes to take root and flourish in the minds of both peoples. Xenophobic and racist thinking would spread even more. Putting the Other out of sight will not solve the problem. It will only make dehumanization easier, and justify a more extreme struggle against that Other.
So, instead of being tempted by dubious ideas like the establishment of a border and the unilateral erection of a wall, it would be better for Israel to invest its energy in the immediate recommencement of negotiations. If Arafat is unacceptable to Sharon and Bush, let those leaders explain to us how they can create a better situation, and how they can assure us — if one could be reassured by such a thing — that Arafat’s successor will agree to accept their dictates. Until they can do so, they bear the responsibility, no less weighty than Arafat’s responsibility, for the immobility, the insensibility, and the despair on both sides, and for the continued violence and killing.
Two Years of Intifada
September 2002
On the second anniversary of the Intifada, Arafat was under Israeli siege for the second time; terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians inside Israel and in the occupied territories continued, keeping Israeli security forces on constant high alert; the sides were not negotiating a cease-fire; and President Bush was busy building a coalition for an attack on Iraq, planned to take place sometime in the near future.
I might begin this piece on the second anniversary of the second Intifada precisely two years ago, with the day when Ariel Sharon made his entry into the Temple Mount, on September 28, 2000, and set off a conflagration in the occupied territories. But the story could actually begin in any of the seven years that preceded September 2000. During that period, Israel and the Palestinians did everything in their power to disrupt and confound the delicate agreement they cobbled together at Oslo. Israel doubled the number of its settlers in the territories, and the Palestinians smuggled in weapons, hoarded ammunition, and prepared for war.
Those who were attentive then to the Palestinians’ complaints and warnings about the Oslo agreement and the reality it was supposed to make permanent could have seen something was amiss. It offered the Palestinians a tiny state, sliced into segments by a massive Israeli presence. More than anything else, this reality served Israel’s stringent security needs. The prescient could have understood then what had to happen.
Few in Israel were capable of listening to the warnings. That is our, the Israelis’, historic mistake. The Palestinians themselves joined in the march of folly by responding to Sharon’s provocation with an outbreak of unrestrained violence. What happened next is already history, and a tragedy. Two years have gone by. Two years of unlived life for both peoples. Two years of living with our senses, our reason for living, our habits, our hopes dulled and constricted. Two years of gradually congealing thought that could be expressed only in large red headlines.
More than 625 Israelis have been killed in a total of 14,280 incidents in these past two years. Some 1,370 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli military forces. A total of 4,500 Israelis have been injured in terrorist attacks, and among the Palestinians, the numbers are much higher — the Palestinian Red Crescent organization reported two weeks ago a total of 19,649 wounded.
Yet each side is certain that the other side has not suffered sufficiently. That being the case, it’s clear that the conflict has yet to exhaust the reservoirs of hatred, and has yet to bring both peoples to the state of exhaustion that will be necessary for them to begin making concessions. Almost the opposite is true — the Palestinians’ bloody terrorist attacks have led to a metamorphosis. The thirty-three years of Israel’s repression in the territories that it conquered in 1967 (a conquest that was instigated, let’s not forget, by the hostile acts of Arab countries against Israel) have nearly been expunged from Israeli consciousness. It’s very convenient for most Israelis to believe that now accounts with the Palestinians have been settled, and the blame for the current situation lies entirely on their shoulders.
And this may well be the root cause of the prevailing despair that any mutual understanding can be achieved. The Palestinians begin their timeline of the conflict from, at the latest, 1948, when the State of Israel was founded. Israelis, for the most part, place the starting point of their timeline at September 2000.
According to this Israeli perception, there is no chance of any compromise now, because “there’s no partner,” because “the Palestinians are all terrorists,” and because “they rejected the generous offer made them by Ehud Barak.” The Palestinians also despair in advance of any compromise. In their perception, any agreement that could be achieved now, in the current international climate, would favor Israel, and would certainly not meet even the minimal requirements of the Palestinian people.
In hindsight, the Palestinians’ strategic choice to use terrorism as their weapon worked like a boomerang. It severely weakened the moral force of the Palestinian struggle and branded Yasir Arafat as a terrorist in the United States and other parts of the Western World. It also provided a not insignificant justification for Israel’s harsh and massive military response. Now, nearly every Palestinian action, even if it is justified resistance to the occupation, is perceived by policymakers in the West as terrorism. To a large extent, this paralyzes the Palestinian cause.
There’s an astonishing paradox on the Israeli side. Israel is worse off than it has ever been in the last thirty-five years. Its security, economy, and national morale are in decline. Yet Ariel Sharon, its failure of a prime minister, remains the most popular man in the country. There’s a simple explanation. Sharon has succeeded, with no little help from Palestinian terrorism, in getting the Israeli people to restrict their view of their complex conflict with the Palestinians to a single question. Israelis now think solely of their personal security. It’s certainly an issue of decisive importance, especially in the current state of affairs. Yet Sharon’s political cunning is such that he has succeeded in reducing it to a single dimension, so that the only answer to the great and complicated question “How does Israel make itself secure?” is “By force.”
This is Sharon’s expertise. Force, more force, and only force. The result is that any time some small flicker of a chance appears, every time there is a decline in violence, Sharon rushes to carry out another “targeted liquidation” of one or another Palestinian commander, and the fire flares again. Any time Palestinian representatives declare their willingness to renew negotiations and halt violence and suicide attacks, the response from Sharon’s office is dismissal and derision. As far as the current Israeli government is concerned, even if the current Palestinian leadership were to swear fealty to Sharon’s Likud Party, the act would be labeled a sinister gambit aimed at gaining legitimacy for the armed struggle against Israel.
Sharon has loyal allies — the extremists among the Palestinians, who are also quick to incite the mob and send endless suicide bombers to Israel’s cities each time there seems to be a respite. Each side is thus playing on the fears and despair of the other, each chasing the other around the familiar vicious circle — the more violence increases, the less chance there is of persuading people on either side that there is any possibility of a compromise, pushing the violence up to even higher levels. Day by day the temptation grows to view the opponent as other than human, making any action against him permissible. But those who permit themselves to do anything to their enemies are, for all intents and purposes, declaring that they, too, are inhuman, thus inviting a similar kind of vengeance from their opponents.