Biography

. . . THEN TO ISRAEL AND PALESTINE? OR TO WHERE?

Looking forward to the future will certainly offer a more attainable goal than pretending to move forward while looking into the rear-view mirror! The Jewish people “returned from the Diaspora to Zion” to live in peace: Peace for themselves, and let’s hope peace for others too. The Palestinians today are living their own Diaspora inside and outside their ancestral homeland, and they too long for the same peace. They need to make aliya too as the Jews did.

The tragic events that scarred the history of the Palestinians and the Israelis over the past hundred years are painful for both, and call for a gradual assisted recovery, that is if both people are willing and able to chart their course together freely and honestly. If they are unable to do that and unwilling to rethink their approach, then they can kiss peace goodbye, and the world will be a worse place.

Several Israeli writers, who are unfairly referred to on occasion by their detractors as “revisionists”, have in general been scholarly and accurate in their coverage of the problem from its genesis.³³ Others are simply incapable of transcending their prejudices, or premeditated blindness, and inability to see that suffering is a universal human (and even animal) condition, not just a monopoly of the Jewish people.

The situation is reflected on the Arab side where there is also a good deal of self-blindness especially among the leaders as far as facts are concerned. Such types on both sides love what they say and thrive on it, whether it is factual or not, and irrespective of the harm it does even to their own case. These people constitute a mortal danger to any future mutually satisfactory accommodation or peace between the Israelis, the Palestinians, the Arabs and everyone who has a stake in world peace. Thanks to such individuals, there has been no dearth of reasons for the failure of previous peace processes, road maps and interim agreements despite the goodwill of many others who have their heads above their shoulders and their feet solidly on the ground.

Answering his own question, “Why did the Oslo agreement fail”, the Israeli writer Uri Avnery wrote that “From the beginning, the agreement was built on shaky foundations, because it lacked the main thing: a clear definition of the final objective of the process”. Avnery further notes that “for (Palestinian leader Yasser) Arafat, it was self-evident that the agreed “interim stages” would lead to an independent Palestinian state in the whole of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with perhaps some minor exchanges of territory. East Jerusalem, including of course the Holy Shrines, was to become the capital of Palestine. The settlements would be dismantled”. As for the 1948 Palestinian refugees Avnery says: “I am convinced" continues Avnery "that (Arafat) would have been satisfied with a symbolic return of a limited number of refugees to Israel proper.”
 
“But Rabin’s aim” says Avnery, “was unclear, perhaps even to himself. At the time he was not yet ready to accept a Palestinian state. Absent an agreed destination, all the “interim phases” went awry…Rabin was a child of the classic Zionist ideology…. He carried in his body the genetic code of the Zionist movement, a movement whose aim from the beginning was to turn the Land of Israel into an exclusively Jewish state, which denied the very existence of the Arab Palestinian people and whose logic ultimately meant their displacement…Like most of his generation in the country, he absorbed this ideology with his mother’s milk, and was raised on it throughout. At the critical juncture of his life, he fell victim to an insoluble inner contradiction: his analytical mind told him to make peace with the Palestinians, to “give up” a part of the country and to dismantle the settlements, while his Zionist genetic heritage opposed this with all its might. That manifested itself visibly at the Oslo agreement signing ceremony: he offered his hand to Arafat because his mind commanded it, but all his body language expressed rejection.”

Avnery does not stop at analyzing what went wrong, but he proposed a way out, when he said towards the end of the article that “it is impossible to make peace without a basic mental and emotional commitment to peace. Impossible to change the direction of a historic movement without reassessing its history. Impossible for a leader to steer his people towards a total change (as the Turkish leader Kemal Ataturk did in Turkey for example) if he is not completely devoted to the change himself. Impossible to make peace with an enemy without understanding his truth”³⁴. Unfortunately, at the end, the internal forces that created the climate for (Rabin’s) murder were the winners, and both the Israeli people and the Palestinians the losers. In a globalized world, we all lost with them.

It may be fair to add that following decades of nothing but violence, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians were properly “programmed” to know what to do to achieve peace. Besides, in both camps there were those who opposed the peace process in all its forms. They simply did not want to see any agreement that accommodates the other side too. For these oppositionists, sharing is losing.