Historical analogies are often misleading; but they are inevitable.
How else can we understand the conflicts in which we are embroiled,
the dilemmas we are facing, without resorting to comparisons with
the history of other nations? But, in point of fact, Israelis and
Palestinians can learn very little from historical
precedents.
It is often said that the fierceness of the struggle between the
two peoples stems from the fact that both Israelis and Palestinians
claim the same territory as their historical homeland; but the
roots of the conflict go much deeper. The heart of the matter is
that for decades Israelis and Palestinians denied each other's
right to exist as national entities. This mutual rejection is much
more than a conflict over territory. Territories can be fought
over, compromised on, carved up, eventually shared; but when each
party claims exclusive ownership of the disputed land, and is
profoundly convinced that the other has no right to exist, there is
no way out of the quagmire: only a fight to the finish.
This is what has set the Israeli¬Palestinian conflict apart
and moulded its unique features, unprecedented in history. Israelis
often argue that, if Palestinian and Arab leaders had not
repeatedly refused any compromise over the disputed land -
especially if they had not rejected out of hand the 1947 U.N.
resolution on the partition of mandatory Palestine into two states,
one Arab, the other Jewish - a solution satisfactory to both sides
could have been worked out in time; but history does not consist of
"ifs". Moreover at that time the Palestinians could not even
imagine sharing the land: they felt, they were sure that Palestine
was theirs by right and theirs only. Thus the emergence of the
State of Israel in 1948 descended on them as an individual and
national tragedy.
I got an inkling of this tragedy at the end of the 1950s, when I
listened to a dear friend of mine, the late Rashid Hussein, a noted
Palestinian poet and teacher. "I knew that the British would one
day leave," he said, "and that I would then live in a Palestinian
state. Were we not the majority in this land, and had we not lived
and toiled here for hundreds of years? Then one night I went to
sleep, and the next day I woke up in a different world. From a
majority in my country, I had become a minority. And it was not my
country anymore, but a Jewish state called IsraeL".
Most Israelis today are familiar with the plight of the Palestinian
refugees; but few are aware of the pain, the sense of loss, and the
alienation experienced by those Palestinian Arabs who did not flee,
but remained in their towns and villages under Israeli rule and
became Israeli citizens. The failure of the Israelis to understand
Palestinian national aspirations has its counterpart in the failure
of Palestinians to understand Jewish national dreams and feelings.
I remember a conversation with the late Anwar Nusseibeh (the father
of Dr. Sar at the end of 1968.
lived peace- fully side by side in the Arab world,"* he said. "If
not for the Zionist aberration, this would still be the situation
today. The Jews are a religious community: why this sudden folly of
wanting a state of your own?"
Twenty years after the birth of the State of Israel, one year after
the 1967 war, this l
highly intelligent and educated man still did not understand the
national dimension of the Jewish people, and could not corne to
terms with the reality of the Jewish state. For many years, most
Palestinians did not grasp - and many still do not - that the
Jewish people's attachment to Zion, Eretz Yisrael (the Land of
Israel) and to Jerusalem is not only a religious one, but also has
a national content. For the Bible, unlike the Quran and the New
Testament, is not only a book of revelations, of religious
teachings, but is also a history of the Hebrews, the forefathers of
the Jewish people, who lived here for about 17 centuries, prior to
their expulsion by the Roman Legions. This history which spans some
2,000 years, from the settlement of the 12 tribes to the
crystallization of those tribes into one nation, beginning with
King Saul, and reaching its apex under Kings David and Solomon, is
what ties Zionism, the national movement of the Jewish people, to
Zion, the Land of
Israel. The fact that, during Jewish life in the diaspora, another
people, the Palestinian
Arabs, carne to inhabit this land, to cherish it, and eventually to
clash with the Zionist settlers returning to the land of their
ancestors, became a tragedy for both peoples. This tragic encounter
between two national movements must be understood as such by both
peoples, if we are to succeed in working out together a rational
solution to the conflict.
The Palestinians' systematic rejection of Israel's national
existence, and their dogged refusal to countenance any form of
territorial compromise, year after year, decade after decade,
played into the hands of Israel's leaders, from Ben-Gurion in 1948
to Golda Meir and yitzhak Rabin in the 1970s and 1980s. It enabled
them to ignore and deny Palestinian national rights - and with a
good conscience at that.
Following Israel's victory in 1948-49 over six invading Arab armies
expecting to nip the new¬born state in the bud, Ben-Gurion
expanded the U.N. partition plan borders, and divided the
Palestinian territories between Israel and King Abdullah of
Trans¬jordan. Abdullah annexed the VVest Bank, including East
Jerusalem, and pro¬claimed himself (with Britain's
bles¬sing) king of Jordan. Egypt occupied and took charge of
the Gaza Strip.
In fact the Palestinians' intran¬sigent attitude of "all or
nothing" proved to be their undoing. And in the subsequent years
the mutual exclusion - the Palestinians' total rejection of
Israel's right to exist and the parallel rejection of Palestinian
national aspirations by Israel ¬would constantly feed upon
each other. The two peoples were separated by a wall of fear and
hatred, and a process of dehumanization started. To the
Palestinians, who had lost a homeland, there was no State of
Israel, but a devilish "Zionist Entity", the artificial creation of
American imperialism. To the Israelis, subjected to terrorist
attacks, there was no Palestinian nation, but a gang of
bloodthirsty, irrational killers.
Then came the war of June 1967. The ensuing occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza, accompanied by the brutality of arbitrary military
rule, had a curious by-product. From 1949 to 1967, Palestinians and
Israelis spoke to each other only with guns. Now the daily contact
through labor and business slowly started to alter the distorted
almost demonic - image they had of each other and had cherished for
so long.
The Israelis learned to their surprise that the Palestinians, while
fiercely opposed to the occupation, to Jewish settlement in their
midst, and to annexation, were not just a bunch of terrorists. The
great majority of the Palestinian people - laborers, peasants,
businessmen, teachers, professionals - simply wanted to be free and
independent, just like the Israelis and other nations. Similarly
the Palestinians carne face to face with Israel's complex reality,
a reality of soldiers and security agents, of oppression and
humiliation, but also of workers, farmers, businessmen,
intellectuals, with whom one could talk, drink coffee, argue,
disagree ... and meet again.
Meanwhile the leaders of both Israel and the Palestinians remained
entrenched in their mutual denial of each other's national rights;
but inside Israel a growing opposition to the occupation started to
take root, an occupation viewed by many as harmful, not only to the
Palestinians, but also to the Israelis themselves, and dangerous to
the democratic fabric of Israeli society. Writers like Amos Oz,
A.B.Yehoshua, and David Grossman, political figures such as Arieh
(Lova) Eliav, Shulamit Aloni, and Yael Dayan, journalists like
Nathan Yellin-Mor, Uri A vneri, Boaz Evron, Amos Kenan, and
indefatigable peace campaigners like Abie Nathan, increasingly
denounced the fiendishness and injustice of the rule of one people
over another. They started seeking out Palestinian figures, and in
due time PLO leaders. The Israeli "peaceniks" were derided as
dreamers and denounced as traitors; their Palestinian counterparts,
the Hammamis, the Sartawis, the Kallaks and others, often paid with
their lives for their courageous search for peace and reconcilia
tion. But these encounters brought about a better knowledge of each
other's demands, grievences, hopes and fears. The necessity of
reaching a compromise started to filter slowly into the
psychological make-up of both Israelis and Palestinians.
Did all this result in the present dramatic change? Did the Israeli
peaceniks succeed in convincing Rabin that negotiations and
hand¬ shaking were wiser than bone¬ breaking? Did the
Palestinian peaceniks convince Arafat that the endless battle
against Israel's existence was not only futile, but tragically
harmful for the Palestinian nation?
It would be nice to think so. Alas, history does not work that way.
There is no doubt that efforts made by intellectuals of both sides
to reach out to each other exerted a
definite influence on the psychological climate; but nations and
their leaders do not easily decide to end a deep-sea ted conflict,
spanning generations. Uncompromising struggles only end when
national leaders corne to the conclusion that the cost of warring
is too high, and - even more important - that the total defeat of
the other side is not a realistic objective. In addition to this,
combat fatigue, increasing national weariness, also plays a major
role in the maturing of a process leading toward the search for a
compromise solution.
It took four major military confrontations (1948, 1956, 1967 and
1973) to convince first Egypt's Sadat, and then other Arab leaders,
that Israel was too hard a nut to be cracked by war. Conversely,
Israeli leaders learned the hard way that peace, acceptance and
recognition could not be imposed by force - not even by the most
spectacular military victories.
One cannot overrate the influence of the Intifada in changing the
approach of both Israel and the PLO to the conflict. In November
1988, one year after the start of the Intifada, the Palestine
National Council (PNC) convened in Algiers and, prodded by
Arafat and his allies, took a revolutionary step toward
Palestinian-Israeli compromise and conciliation. The Palestinian
popular uprising, holding its ground inspite of Israel's harsh
counter-measures, restored the pride of the Palestinian people and
enhanced its stature all over the world.
Arafat knew how to capitalize on this new situa tion, and convinced
the majority of the PNC to change course and accept U.N. Security
Council Resolution 181 of 1947, which recommended the partition of
mandatory Palestine into two states. True enough, the PLO chairman
presented this acceptance as a necessary step, granting the
Palestinians international legitimacy for their claim to an
independent state, and Arafat was promptly elected president of an
(as yet) nonexistent state; but accepting Resolution 181 was
tantamount to the implicit recognition of the international
legitimacy of the other side, the State of Israel. The scene was
set for future Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations.
Meanwhile Rabin was still a long way from understanding the
significance and impact of the new form of struggle by the
Palestinians. While terrorism had only increased Israel's resolve
to fight, and hardened its opposition to all Palestinian demands,
the stubborn "war of stones" started to change the Israeli state of
mind. In the first days and weeks of the Intifada, Rabin still
thought that he could subdue the rebellious Palestinians with harsh
military operations; but this was to change. Following several
years of continuous confrontation, Rabin realized that Israel was
faced not by mere acts of terror, but by what he himself termed a
"popular uprising."
The road that led from bone'¬ breaking to hand-shaking has
been soaked with the blood, pain and suffering of both peoples:
mainly of the Palestinians, but also of the Israelis. When Israeli
soldiers started asking again and again, "What the hell are we
doing in Gaza?" or, "Why do we have to chase Palestinian kids
because they raise a PLO flag?" Rabin, who is both a tough soldier
and a pragmatic statesman, started to look for a way out of the
mess.
The Rabin-Arafat hand-shake in Washington, under Clinton's
benevolent smile, was hailed by many as a miracle. In fact the real
"miracle", the most important feature of this historic event, was
the mutual recognition of Israel and the PLO, written into the
Declaration of Principles.
The Israeli-Palestinian negotiations are not - and cannot be -
easy. Many objective difficulties, constant misunderstandings, and
outbursts of mutual mistrust will have to be overcome before a
settlement acceptable to both sides is worked out. However, the
signatures affixed by Rabin and Arafat to their mutual recognition,
which replaced half a century of mutual inability and unwillingness
to recognize each others national aspirations, heralds the start of
a new era in Israeli-Palestinian relations, an era where hope has
replaced despair, where the determination to find a reasonable
compromise between each other's vital interests is overcoming the
wall of hatred separating the two peoples, and the endless spilling
of their blood.