VERSE

...The American government probably understands this, but its people do not...

...One does not like to contemplate the result if the two should ever slip out of phase...

...The scale of Israeli retaliation doesn't make sense...

...Israel has important security interests in the West Bank--interests both greater in importance and harder to defend than is generally recognized1 but the idea that the West Bank belongs to Israel is preposterous...

...and these things take time...

...Whenever I cross Broad Brook, a stream in central Vermont which is just as wide, if not quite so deep as the Jordan, I think of all the lyric poetry it would have inspired over the last five thousand years, if only it had run through Palestine...

...But as soon as a leader comes along who shows every .sign of being r.eady to make a real peace (at great personal risk, it might be added, a fact suggesting the train may not linger long at the station), Begin calls him intransigent, ridicules his terms, condescends to his emissary, and in general behaves as if peace were the very last thing on Israel's mind...

...If the Arabs really want Jerusalem back--I mean, re~ly want it back-then a peace agreement is out of the question, because Israel won't surrender it...

...I dottbt it...

...I remember that, and I remember the small Lebanese hill towns, where the Christian girls all seemed dressed for church in the middle of the week, wearing trim wool skirts, beige sweaters with bone buttons, stockings...

...Am I alone in conceiving the ultimate outcome as a new aliyah...

...Israel needs peace, not settlements...

...We heard a good deal about Gaff Rubin, the American photographer murdered by the Palestinians after they had asked her for directions...

...It required 30 years and four wars to begin direct talks with .the Arabs...

...it is not so well known that they are very hostile...

...My friend Tim Hobart and I stopped along the way and watched an Israeli patrol car follow the fence across the valley, kicking up dust...

...This is Commonweal: 273 not something solely in me province of the press, but the press has done such a bad job of it so far that the whole debate is veering about like a rudderless ship in a rising sea...

...That is a term Israelis themselves use to describe an Israel which includes the West Bank...

...No one seems to have taken the trouble to establish the exact figur e . None of this makes sense...

...What can Begin be up to...

...Why is Begin suddenly saying--the first Israeli premier to so much as suggest such a thing-that UN Resolution 242 doesn't apply to the West Bank or the Gaza strip7 Of course it applies...

...The heart of the problem is the passion which runs so high where Arabs and Israelis are concerned...

...Ever since Sadat's trip to Jerusalem, Begin has been behaving in a .bewildering manner, responding to Sadat's generous gesture with provocative pettifoggery, not only rejecting all talk of independence for "Judea and Samaria"-the ancient Jewish names for the West Bank-but actually trying to establish more settlements...

...It strikes me as at least possible that all the seeming confusion is really only maneuvering around this last central issue...

...The degradation of the Palestinians has proved contagious...

...Everybody knows that the Palestinians are hostile to Israel...

...Israel might return the West Bank to Jordan, with suitable guarantees...

...Which is odd, considering the importance of rivers in that parched countryside...

...Life's nicer near a prosy brook in cool retreat, Than next a poet's river churned by warriors' feet...

...By this I mean that the terms might threaten the governments of those countries, but not their national existence...

...Americans in particular shrink from the awful consequences of a shift in sympathy, with the result that most commentary on the prospects for peace in the Middle East seems to be written in either of two moods: lawyerly devotion to the client's case on the .part of those who hope Israel is in the right, but are for Israel right or wrong...

...very likely it will take another 30 to work out the details, if we're lucky...

...If Israel knows that a peace agreement would founder on this issue alone, it would make sense for her to be intransigent on all the others, since nothing would isolate Israel more than to be blamed for holding out for a city whose sovereignty means so little to the world at large, and so much to her...

...With little effect, because so far American Jews and the American public have been pretty much in agreement where Israel is concerned...

...The timid American reactionmit's hard to say whether Washington or the press waffled more---doesn't make sense...

...Peace for Israel would be as fundamental as a constitution, and just as Israel has found it easier to live without a written constitution, thus avoiding such questions as the role of religion in the state, she has found it easier to live with cease-fires, than a negotiated peace...

...If Israel's victims are not quite so cold~bloodedly dispatched as Gail Rubin on the beach north of Tel Aviv, the process is pretty callous all the same...

...In the process, Israel kills some 700 Palestinians and Lebanese...

...An independent Palestinian state would give them a standing in international law they do not currently enjoy, and they could be expected to keep the pot boiling forever...

...Do you really think the dead were exactly 700 in number...

...They think they have a right to live freely in Israel, just as Russian and South African Jews do under the law of return...

...So far Anthony Lewis of the New York Times, notably in a column on March 20, hag been all but alone in pointing out the arithmetic of atrocity, but how long can this last...

...Carter has been much criticized for slipping towards partisanship, rather than an honest broker whose only desire is to get the two sides together, but there is something a bit surreal in the notion that the principal, indeed the only supporter of one side in a dispute can be a genuine mediator...

...It's a sure sign things have gone seriously wrong when the news stories don't make sense...

...Who are the victims...

...I remember the care where we stopped for lunch, and the wheat fields, and the flybuzzing peace of the afternoon, but I don't remember anything about the Litani River...

...But something is going on here, and our confusion does not reflect the facts so much as it does our failure to grasp their meaning...

...So many they can't even get the number right...

...With Sadat's visit peace never looked closer...

...If Sadat were to be blamed for a "bad deal" he might lose his job, but Egypt's independence as a nation would hardly be threatened...

...But that is all the more reason to attempt to understand what is going on...

...The second thing to understand is that the terms of the peace matter a great deal to the Israelis and the Palestinians, but not much to the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians...

...This is clearly a very serious matter...

...None of this makes sense...

...The West Bank was at the heart of the ancient kingdom of Solomon, and a peace which surrendered it would mean giving it up pretty much forever...

...The argument over the Sinai settlements is utterly baffling...

...The stories out of the Middle East haven't made sense since Christmas...

...It strikes me that the first point to understand is the fact that the negotiations are only stalled, not halced, and that their seeming disarray is a sign of their seriousness...

...From the confusion then, two things emerge: whar Israel wants are Jerusalem and security...

...But reporters have trouble identifying the victims of Israeli bombers and artillery, with the result that a woman's claim that her husband, sister and three children were all killed in an air raid comes out sounding vaguely fraudulent...

...So far as I know, Broad Brook in its current location has never inspired so much as a couplet...

...Which is okay with me...

...But of course the people on both banks have been plundering it for water to irrigate crops, and even a stream, in the desert, makes an impression...

...So far, only the Arabs have been pointing this out...

...On Saturday, March 11, eleven terrorists from AI Fatah--largest of the guerrilla groups in the Palestine Liberation Organization--landed in Israel and over the next few hours murdered 34 civi28 April 1978:272 lians...

...Well it's not so...

...That is not the case with either the Israelis, whose state has won only partial acceptance, and might lose what it has...

...the Israetis are guilty of choosing known civilian targets...

...These settlements were never a problem before...

...With these two poitr, s in mind, it strikes me that Israeli policy--to call it Begin's is to ignore the similarity of his predecessors' stand--may be explained by any or all of three goals: First: a big Israel...

...These people have no defense against Israeli fighter-bombers...

...The Israeli-Lebanese border was all but impenetrable, raids were few, what did Israel gain by pushing the border north to the Litani River...

...I can remember the ,barbed wire and cyclone fencing along the Israeli-Lebanese border well enough, and the mine fields on the Lebanese side of the wire...

...These PLO raids have a genuinely sickening quality, not only because the victims are almost always weaponless civilians, but because the PLO has been so degraded as to look on the murder of children as an act of heroism...

...that is only the rough figure...

...The American role in this struggle is anomalous...

...These are real civilians, and they have been genuinely killed, and their deaths have no more reason than Gail Rubin's...

...A glance at the map reveals its logic...

...or the Palestinians, who have no state at all, but want one...

...It is an interesting fact that we have not heard much about 3erusalem in the last few months, despite the fact it is potentially the hardest nut of all...

...Peace, in short, is not to be lightly entered into...

...It struck me, when we crossed the old Allenby Bridge, as not much more than a stream, a pretty poor excuse for a river...

...Does he think the rest of the world will never learn basic arithmetic, but will go on indulgently figuring that 700 equals 34...

...For the most part, civilians, a fact which must be induced from the nature of the targets (villages and refugee camps) because the press cannot seem to focus on their names, occupations, legal status, cause of injury, and so on...

...Or so it might seem at first glance...

...The same goes for the Israeli-Egyptian impasse over the West Bank...

...Clearly things are going seriously wrong...

...But worse is to come...

...Does Begin fail to see the risk he runs when he bombs Arab civilians with American planes...

...A lot of Israelis are willing to let the West Bank go, but a lot are not...

...If Israeli claims are indeed unfair, then our support of those claims must partake of the injustice...

...I remember the Jordan well enough...

...They are pretty ,tightly squeezed already, not much better off than a stateless minority like the Kurds...

...it's like shooting ducks on a pond, and 700 ducks is a lot of ducks in retaliation for 34 ducks...

...they certainly do not want to give it to the Palestinians...

...In addition to sentiment are practical considerations of security (I wrote about this at length in "The Road to Tel Aviv," Commonweal, April 29, 1977) and while it is at least theoretically possibly to establish a West Bank state which would not threaten Israeli security, it would be far from easy to do in fact...

...Governments do not often act in haste or unconsidered passion, but peoples do, and the best way to avoid the sort of misunderstanding which might rend the American public and simultaneously encourage a new war is to focus on what is at stake in the momentarily stalled negotiations...

...THOMAS POWERS 28 April 1978:274...

...What in heaven's name can Begin be thinking of...

...But then Begin vows that Israel "will cut off the evil arm" and two days later makes his threat good with a full-scale invasion of Lebanon which does not end until Israel has occupied some 450 square miles of Lebanese territory...

...now it has rarely looked further away, and none of it makes any sense at all...

...and a kind of sentimental befuddlement on the part of those who are neutral in theory, but are afraid someone is going to ask why the United States should back Israeli claims to Arab territory to the tune of better than $1 billion a year...

...Second: an end to the Palestinians as an independent people...

...Third: an Israeli Jerusalem...

...They stopped making sense when Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat began to quarrel about Israeli settlements in the Sinai, an issue which spontaneously generated from the noosphere...

...Only a people completely stripped of dignity and self-respect could take pride in such sneaking cruelty...

...For years the Israelis claimed the Arabs were not interested in a "real peace...