My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (40 page)

So it transpired that peace stopped being peace. It was no longer bound by a realistic analysis of power, interests, opportunity, threat, and alliance—by sound judgment. It ignored Arab aspirations and political culture. It overlooked the existence of millions of Palestinian refugees whose main concern was not the occupation but a wish to return
to their lost Palestine. It was not based on a factual state of affairs, but on a sentimental state of mind. It was a wish, a belief, a faith. In the Israel I grew up in, peace was an existential need that gave birth to a messianic concept. It enabled Israel’s WASPs (White Ashkenazi Supporters of Peace) to believe they could be Israelis without being brutal. It made it possible for progressive Zionists to delude themselves into thinking that they could appease Zionism’s disinherited other. Thus it became the totem of the secular tribe. Peace promised us that we could be pure and righteous and beautiful. Peace meant we would not have to fight for centuries, for we could write a happy ending to our tragedy.

I drive up to Jerusalem to meet with Ze’ev Sternhell, Menachem Brinker, and Avishai Margalit, three of the leading intellectuals of the Israeli peace movement. Two of them were my university professors and the third a political mentor. I ask them what went wrong, what thwarted the peace process.

Sternhell says that Oslo was too little too late. But the real problem was that the Left never managed to advance beyond the well-established Ashkenazi elites. It never managed to build a party that resembled the European social-democratic parties. “This is why we didn’t save Israel in time,” Sternhell tells me. “This is why I am now racked by anxiety,” he says. “Israel is my life, but I see Israel fading away. I see a terminal illness consuming the nation I so love.”

Brinker surprises me by echoing my own theory. He says that like the Right, the Left succumbed to messianic delusions following the Six Day War. It was convinced that Israel was omnipotent. It was certain that everything was in our hands. “We were naïve, but we were also arrogant,” says Brinker. “In principle our position was right, but we refused to see that it was inapplicable. First the Arab states said no. Then King Hussein said no. And the Palestinians were always fickle. But we never seriously dealt with these difficulties. We insisted that if Israel did A, B, and C, there would be peace. That’s why we were vulnerable to attacks from the Right. Time and again the Right exposed our internal contradictions. It proved that the Arab partners we were counting on were not really there.”

Margalit surprises me, too. Not for a second did he believe in Oslo,
he says. One does not hop over a chasm in two jumps. He anticipated violence, killings, and a loss of momentum. He saw in advance that euphoria would evaporate and the counterforces would have the upper hand. He never trusted Rabin, Peres, or Barak. He did not believe peace would be achieved at Camp David. But he never publicly criticized the peace process because he didn’t want to sabotage it. As a movement, the peace movement did have great achievements, he tells me. “Over the years we dominated the debate regarding occupation. We even scored a verbal victory over the Right, which eventually adopted our wording regarding the two-state solution. But on the ground, we lost badly. We didn’t stop colonization. We never managed to forge a coalition wide enough and strong enough to stop the settlers. Now it’s too late. It’s almost irreversible. I don’t see a power within Israel fierce enough to stop the state founded by my parents from becoming an apartheid state.”

I take a seat in a café in the German colony in Jerusalem. Nearby, on Lloyd George Street, stood the headquarters of Peace Now, where I spent many long nights as a student. Here we tried to stop the Lebanon War—and failed. Here we tried to stop the settlements—and failed. Here we tried to bring about peace—and failed. Here we failed to stop the secular Right and the religious Right from taking over the sane Israel we loved. It was a powerful experience. The struggle emboldened us. The protests bolstered our virtuous view of ourselves. The hope for peace gave us meaning. But after listening to Sarid, Beilin, Sternhell, Brinker, and Margalit, I ask myself what was our flaw. Why did we fail in such an astounding way?

My answer is simple. We were right to try peace. We were right to send Beilin’s team to meet with the Palestinians and offer them a grand deal: a demilitarized Palestine living side by side with a Jewish democratic Israel along the 1967 border. But we should never have promised ourselves peace or assumed that peace was around the corner. We should have been sober enough to say that occupation must end even if the end of occupation did not end the conflict. Our goal was to draw a border, to win international recognition for that border, and to gradually and cautiously withdraw to that new border. Our task was to convince the Israeli public that an occupying Israel is doomed and a postoccupation
Israel will be viable and strong. Our mission was to design the greatest Zionist project of all: dividing the land.

But we did not. We failed to say to the world and to our people that occupation must cease even if peace cannot be reached. We failed to tell ourselves the truth about the Palestinian wish to return to their pre-1948 villages and homes. Rather than deal courageously with reality as it is, we fell for the romantic belief in “peace now.” So when the great moment of opportunity arrived in 1993, we missed it. In Oslo we tried to impose a flawed concept of peace on a Middle East reality that soon rejected it. But even after rejection was apparent, we clung to the flawed concept. As buses exploded on the streets of our cities, we kept singing the hymns of our imaginary peace. This is how we lost the trust and respect of our countrymen, who turned away from us because we failed to acknowledge that our wished-for peace was turning into a macabre farce. Our failure was not caused by the forces we encountered, but by our own weakness: by our lack of intellectual integrity and courage, and by our immaturity. We never deigned to inherit the legacy of the founders of Israel that we were supposed to inherit, and we didn’t continue in the footsteps of those we were supposed to follow. The peace clan balked at the historical continuum. It refused to take the reins of true responsibility and remained a 1970s-style protest movement.

Sarid, Beilin, Sternhell, Brinker, and Margalit were the teachers and leaders of my generation, and I feel close to them. I feel empathy and affinity. Even when I argue with them, we are of one stock. Sarid, Margalit, and Brinker understood the folly of occupation in the summer of 1967. Beilin and Sternhell saw the light after the 1973 war and the 1977 upheaval. It is to their credit that they grasped this facet of the story very early and clearly. They were courageous enough to fight a consensus that regarded them as loonies or traitors. But my mentors fostered an oedipal political culture whose main theme was patricide. In a sense, they never grew up. They never became leaders. And they made the mistake of detaching the occupation issue from the wider context of Israeli life and Middle East reality. They were blinded three times over: They saw the inner circle of the conflict in which an Israeli Goliath stands over a Palestinian David, but they didn’t see the outer circle in which an Arab-Islamic Goliath stands over an Israeli David. They saw
that for the Palestinians the 1967 occupation was disastrous, but they did not see that for many Palestinians there are other matters that are far more severe and visceral than occupation, like the homes they lost in 1948. They knew that Israel had to deal with the challenge of occupation, but they overlooked and dismissed the other critical challenges facing the state. Because of these three cognitive flaws, their vision was impaired and their scope of reality grew more and more narrow, until finally they were disconnected from reality. The well-meaning leaders of the Israeli Left and the Israeli peace movement became irrelevant.

I drive back to Tel Aviv to meet with Amos Oz. We’ve known each other a long time. Over a period of twenty years, we have been meeting to discuss life and literature, to debate peace and politics. Although I truly love him, in recent years I have often disagreed with him. Oz is
the
peace prophet. He is the guru of the peace movement and the chief rabbi of Israel’s peace congregation.

I find Amos in a surprisingly good mood. In Italy they have just produced an opera based on his poetic novel
The Same Sea
. His books have been translated into dozens of languages and are read in dozens of countries. The Jerusalem orphan who found a home in Kibbutz Hulda is Israel’s most distinguished author. But his head remains level, and he is as humble as he has always been. In a plaid shirt and old beige trousers he sits in a remote corner of a tidy, plain café in Ramat Aviv. He rises to his feet, shakes my hand, and greets me warmly.

“I am not an Orientalist,” Oz says. “But what I do every morning, from five
A.M
. on, is to try to get into other people’s heads, to imagine how they see the world. In June 1967, when I returned from war in the Sinai desert to Jerusalem, dressed in uniform and carrying an Uzi submachine gun, what I saw was not David’s capital. I saw the Arab shoeshine boy looking at me fearfully. And I remembered my childhood in British Mandate Jerusalem and the intimidating, surly British soldiers. I understood that although Jerusalem is my city, it is a foreign city. I knew I should not rule over it, that Israel must not rule over it. Old Jerusalem is our past, but it is not our present, and it endangers our future. We must not be tempted by what many are fond of describing as its holy silence.

“When I came back to Hulda, I realized that what I saw in Jerusalem, others did not see. Both the Right and mainstream Labor thought of 1967 as the completion of 1948. What we were not strong enough to do then, we were strong enough to do now. What we didn’t conquer then, we conquered now. I thought that state of mind was dangerous. I realized that the West Bank and Gaza Strip are the Palestinians’ poor man’s lamb. I knew we must not take it. Not one inch, not one settlement. We must keep the territories only as a surety until peace is reached.

“Labor’s lions thought as I did: Levi Eshkol, Pinchas Sapir, Abba Eban, Yitzhak Ben Aharon. But the foxes wanted to annex. And when the lions did not roar, the foxes raised their heads, and I was alone. The journalists Uri Avnery and Amos Kenan preceded me, but within the world of Labor I was the first. I wrote against Moshe Dayan’s desire for ‘living space’ and against the rhetoric of land liberation. I called for the establishment of a Palestinian state. I thought both morals and realism dictated only one solution, the two-state solution.

“I was savagely attacked. Even in my own Labor paper,
Davar
. Even in my Kibbutz Hulda. A fellow columnist demanded that
Davar
stop running my articles. Others treated me as a traitor or madman. At the very same time, Israel’s most respected novelists and poets were endorsing the idea of a Greater Israel: Nobel laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon and poet laureates Uri Zvi Grinberg, Nathan Alterman, and Chaim Gouri. I saw the nation drifting away, changing its face. It was no longer the Israel I thought I knew.

“By the early 1990s it was all very different. Reality had struck and changed both Israelis and Arabs. The 1973 war made the Arabs realize they could not take us by force. The 1987–92 Palestinian uprising made the Israelis realize there is a Palestinian people, and they will not go away. They were here, and they were here to stay. After a hundred years of mutual blindness we suddenly saw one another. The illusion that the other would disappear was gone. That’s why the views held by only a handful of Israelis after the Six Day War were eventually adopted by the majority. The ideology of the 1967 Left became the platform of Rabin, Peres, the 1993 government. Peace had moved from the fringes to the very center.

“I saw up close the process Rabin and Peres went through. I knew
them well. They both used to come visit me on Friday nights at Hulda. What changed Rabin were the young people of Israel. He realized that the boys of the twenty-first century would not fight as he did in 1948. What changed Peres was the world. He was visiting many countries and listening, and he realized that he did not want Israel to be the new South Africa. For different reasons and in different ways, both Rabin and Peres realized that the conflict had to end. The predictable hawks they were became hesitant doves.

“When Peres secretly sent me a draft of the Oslo Accords, I saw the problem. I understood that in reality, what we had here was a tricky tripartite agreement between the government of Israel, the PLO, and the settlers. But still I thought it was a good beginning. I believed Oslo would bring down the cognitive wall separating Israelis and Palestinians. And once the wall came down, there would be progress. We would advance step by step toward a true historic conciliation.

“I made one big mistake. I underestimated the importance of fear. The Right’s strongest argument is fear. They don’t say it out loud because they are ashamed to, but their most compelling argument is that we are afraid. It’s a legitimate argument. I, too, am afraid of the Arabs. So if I were to start the peace movement all over again, that’s the one change I would make. I would address our fear of the Arabs. I would have a genuine dialogue about the Israeli fear of extinction.

“Desperate? I am not yet desperate. Oslo was not genuinely implemented because it was a baby unloved by both parents. But it’s not too late. The settlement problem can be resolved. Both sides know compromise is essential. They don’t love each other. They cheat on each other. They shout at each other. But whether they like it or not, they see each other. In this sense the emotional breakthrough of 1993 was real. The taboo was broken. The cognitive block fell away. In spite of everything, we now face the Palestinians, nation to nation, to discuss the division of the land. That is no small feat. Peace is an experiment that has not yet failed.”

So I end my peace journey in Hulda, where Amos Oz lived for half his life. Hulda is Ben Shemen’s twin sister: it began as an agricultural farm that was to teach Jewish immigrants how to work the land of Israel.
Located in the center of the country, it was founded by the Zionist movement in 1908 on land bought from Arabs, near the Jaffa–Jerusalem railway and the Arab village of Hulda. An olive grove in memory of Theodor Herzl was planted here, too, and a baronial house called Herzl House was built. But in the summer of 1929 the Hulda farm was attacked and burned down by its Arab neighbors. So when the moderate, harmony-seeking socialist Gordonia commune settled here a year later, in the Herzl house in the Herzl pine forest beside the olive grove, it was to make a statement: although we were shot at, and our houses were burned down and our trees uprooted, we shall not give up our dream.