The intifada

...He has sent Shultz packing...

...And by now, of course, the intifada has become part of the routine of life: a nagging nuisance but no longer seen as unmanageable...

...During the Gulf War Shamir led the country with admirable moderation, showing that when the territorial obsession is not involved he has a clear mind and a steady hand...

...and, last but not least, to hit the ball into the other court on the assumption that the Arabs can normally be counted upon to come up with their own extremist demands...

...Whatever the answer, it has lent a new credibility to the efforts of the Likud spokesmen to demonize the PLO...

...On a hot summer night in July 1989, the central committee of the Likud had been called together in the Tel Aviv Exhibition Grounds for what was expected to be a showdown between Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon...

...move a long way toward Palestinian home rule in the territories...

...Or was he simply following Palestinian public opinion, attempting to ensure internal unity and his own leadership...

...Following the elections of November 1988, Yitzhak Shamir, the Likud leader, after six weeks of bargaining, decided against a narrow right-wing government, opting instead for a renewal of the coalition with Labor...

...the rate of immigration is already down to half of what was predicted for this spring...

...and there was every reason to expect a repetition of previous such confrontations, when the Israeli public had been presented with pictures of the massive figure of Sharon looming menacingly over a pocket-size prime minister unable to make himself heard amid the uproar...

...The accepted wisdom at the time was that Shamir had found a common language with Yitzhak Rabin and preferred to work in close consultation with him to the exclusion of Shimon Peres, on the one hand, and Ariel Sharon and David Levy, on the other...

...Or did he anticipate a long struggle and an indecisive conclusion...

...But an agreement was reached at the very last moment between the two men...

...The Israeli economy is damaged marginally, but incomparably greater hardship is suffered by the Palestinian population itself...

...He now insisted that a decision taken by the party, even though endorsed by the prime minister and the other Likud ministers, had nothing to do with the government...

...When Shamir finds that he is forced to take a stand on a peace initiative, he falls back on a wide range of tactics...

...To cap it all, the Lubavicher rebbe intervened from Brooklyn (he has never set foot in Israel and apparently does not intend to until the Messiah comes), encouraging two members of the Aguda to break party ranks, thus finally aborting Labor's chances...

...The Likud had run its election campaign in the fall of 1988 under the slogan "Only the Likud Can...

...There were many voices in the Israeli elite, including leading members of the Labor party such as Ezer Weizman and Yanosh Ben-Gal (both ex-military commanders) who insisted that Israel had to respond to the Scud missiles by an attack on Iraq...

...That meeting would decide on the composition of the Palestinian delegation to negotiate with Israel about the modalities of the election in the Occupied Territories...

...In turn, the Likud's hold on its own constituency appears to be unshaken...

...housing shortages are acute...

...A tripartite conference in Cairo was planned for early 1990 to bring together the foreign secretaries of Egypt and Israel with Secretary of State James Baker...

...Meanwhile, the murder of Israeli Jews by knifing, shooting, and bus attacks provokes eruptions of grief and anger in Israeli society—they clearly call up collective memories of pogroms and Nazi atrocities— but the political beneficiaries, if any, of this reaction are more likely to be the radical right than Labor...

...A furious revolt broke out in the ranks of one of the major ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas, when it was contemplating an alliance with Labor...

...Generally understood to have been initiated by Rabin but adopted by Shamir, it was based on the idea of free and democratic elections by the Palestinians in the occupied areas...

...Having to work within these narrow parameters, Shamir has developed a number of techniques and fall-back positions...

...In particular, he has made it a point to reject any form of international conference as highly dangerous to Israel...

...people are not going to the territories...

...From the Likud's perspective, the hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews who have arrived can be expected to provide the answer to the "demographic problem...

...But he is a man who knows exactly what he wants and has proved extraordinarily successful at achieving it...

...The representatives thus elected would negotiate an autonomous form of Palestinian administration to last five years, during which time a permanent solution would be sought...

...resolutions 242 and 338 and pledged an end to acts of terrorism...

...Levy was left SUMMER • 1991 • 337 Reports from Abroad, with housing and Sharon with trade and industry, both second-rank posts...

...This added up to a variation on the Camp David treaty, but one that would permit the Palestinians to have a larger say in the negotiations than envisaged in the Israel-Egyptian peace agreement of 1979...

...Sharon was to oppose him by calling on the party to impose various conditions (or "restraints") on that initiative...

...And that constituency is increasing in size, fed as it is by the growth of the oriental community...

...Creeping annexation is turning into a gallop...

...to gain time...

...As a historian, I suffer from the occupational disease of the profession: a reluctance to commit myself to predictions likely to be contradicted even before they appear in print...

...he is reluctant to confront someone like Sharon head on, especially at large party forums...

...has given a negative answer to Baker's questions in 1990...

...Shamir, in exchange, incorporated Sharon's conditions into his extremely hawkish speech: East Jerusalem Arabs, he declared, would not be able to vote in the proposed elections: Jewish settlement in the areas was to continue uninterrupted during the negotiating process...

...Urged on by Egypt, the PLO now gave many signs that it was ready to accept the rules of the new diplomatic game...

...the annual package of aid has not been reduced...

...F for the conclusions...

...Such speculation proved to be illusory...

...Tourists are staying away...

...and by the mass immigration of Soviet Jews, who are in large part imbued with the chauvinistic values prevalent in the crumbling USSR...

...But, in the meantime, those policies look far more viable than I expected some three years ago...

...In the new government Peres found himself with the thankless task of finance minister, having been replaced in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Moshe Arens...

...As for action, the establishment of a much-publicized new settlement in the West Bank can always be guaranteed to slow things down still more...

...What drove Arafat to associate himself and his movement so totally with Saddam Hussein remains something of a mystery...

...In December 1989, in a festive demonstration organized by Peace Now, many thousands of Jews and Arabs, calling for reconciliation, linked hands around the Old City of Jerusalem...

...Over the last months, the army, anxious to prevent still more violence, has frequently felt compelled for a day or days at a time to forbid the entry into Israel of all the Arabs from the Occupied Territories...

...with the costs of the occupation (in money and strains on the army) greatly increased...

...And just to make sure that progress can be aborted, still another technique is available: outrageous statements can be issued or provocative actions launched...

...By now some 350 Palestinians have been killed as "collaborators," despite calls 340 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad from the leadership to halt what could easily become an uncontrollable spiral of violence...

...While Israel came out of the war with heightened international prestige, with its armed forces intact (indeed strengthened by additional U.S...

...Yossi Sarid, Israel's most brilliant parliamentarian, even stated that the peace bandwagon was accelerating too fast to be stopped...

...Israel held on to a large section of Lebanese territory, despite heavy losses to its troops, until he was replaced by Peres as prime minister in 1984...

...However, given the fact that the Palestinian Arabs inevitably seek to rid themselves of Israeli rule, there can be no way of ensuring that they could be fobbed SUMMER • 1991 • 339 Reports from Abroad off indefinitely with minor concessions ("running their own garbage disposal," as we often say here...

...to enhance Israel's flagging popularity in the West, particularly in the United States...

...What was then only an incipient problem—"[T]he uprising has, to a significant extent and de facto, restored the 'green line' or pre-1967 borders" —has meanwhile become an entrenched reality...

...partition plan of 1947 and the Camp David peace treaty of 1979...

...And Ariel Sharon, of course, was constantly urging a military response...

...An important key to deciphering the man surely lies in the fact that in 1940 he chose to join the most extreme splinter faction, the Lehi, which alone during the Second World War refused to declare a truce in the armed struggle against the British in order to allow the Allied campaign against Hitler to proceed unhindered...

...Did he expect the war to be averted at the last moment...

...And it is hardly surprising that it is determined to settle a significant number of Soviet Jews in the Occupied Territories, whatever the costs...

...On the Israeli left a mood of cautious optimism could be felt in those months of late 1989 and early 1990...

...Sometimes he chooses a procedural issue, declaring it totally unacceptable...

...After all, the Western media have long lost interest in it, thus relieving the pressure on Israel...

...Secretary of State George Shultz had failed with a maximalist approach—an international peace conference based on the principle of "territories for peace...

...There was also pressure from within the armed forces themselves (although, it seems, not from Chief of Staff Dan Shomron...

...These conditions, if understood to be nonnegotiable, were enough to ensure the ultimate failure of the peace process...

...The Likud central committee, made up of some 2,500 delegates, is a notoriously unpredictable, unruly, and even potentially violent body...

...Then, too, there are Shamir's own diplomatic initiatives of which we have so far witnessed two—that of May 1989 and the one set in motion this spring following the defeat of Iraq...

...One of Shamir's better-known statements in recent times was his declaration that a Greater Israel is needed to receive the immigration from the Soviet Union...

...After almost three months of hard bargaining, Shamir was able to present his narrow right-wing government to the Knesset where it won by 62 to 57...

...Or as I put it at the time: Public demand for clear-cut answers is bound to grow...

...Yet congressional support for Israel remains firm...

...And the issue has been raised again by Shamir, in the context of Baker's peace plans developed since the Gulf War (even though David Levy, now foreign minister, has meanwhile switched from the extreme hawkish to the dovish wing of the Likud...

...aid), and with the knowledge that the most powerful Arab army in the Middle East had been largely destroyed, the PLO emerged in disarray...

...by the tendency of the youth to become more hawkish the more the internal security situation deteriorates...

...Doubtless, one will witness periods of relative quiet . . . but in all probability they will be mere lulls in the storm...

...In December 1988, Arafat, in the name of the PLO, had declared the acceptance of U.N...

...The membership, essentially of North African origin, was clearly moved by a profound antipathy for the secularism, westernism, and moderation vis-a-vis the Arabs that (rightly or wrongly) it associates with Labor—as well as by the notorious personal aversion to Shimon Peres...

...Sharon and company declared that the plan constituted a large step toward a Palestinian state: Weizman argued that by seeking to exclude the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) it was doomed to failure...

...The Palestinian population for many weeks was subjected to a draconian and cruel curfew, but as a result they stayed put, with their towns and villages intact...

...The prize obiter dictum during the recent flurry of talks here in Jerusalem was probably Shamir's remark that he was certainly in favor of Israeli-Syrian negotiations without any preconditions: "Syria will ask for the return of the Golan Heights, and we will say no...

...Polarization will erode the middle ground hitherto occupied by the Likud...

...On December 31, 1989, Shamir dismissed Ezer Weizman from the government for "maintaining contacts with Israel's worst enemies," but a couple of days later he decided to reinstate him (although no longer as a member of the inner cabinet...

...He repeatedly declared that what the Likud had decided "did not constitute a change in the government's diplomatic initiative...

...Rabin, in contrast, retained the powerful post of defense minister (which means serving as overlord of the Occupied Territories...

...So doing, he had opened the way to the decision by George Shultz (by then a lame duck) to initiate an official dialogue between the U.S...

...The policy of "transfer" (now openly represented in the Shamir government by Rehavam Zeevi's Moledet party) can in all probability become a real option only in the heat of combat, and for those on the extreme right an opportunity was thus missed last January and February...

...But none of this is likely to shake Shamir's confidence...

...It has to be remembered that ever since Shamir arrived in the country some fifty-five years ago he has persistently opposed the compromise agreements that have enabled this small people situated in a hostile political environment to escape isolation—in particular, the U.N...

...In February, in another sign of growing tension, Ariel Sharon resigned from the government...

...A major crisis now threatened both the unity of the government—Labor seriously considered abandoning the coalition—and relations with the United States administration, which saw its peace initiative about to disintegrate...

...With the supply of cheap and submissive Arab labor increasingly disrupted by strikes and violence...

...We have a very big problem...

...If, nonetheless, the ball comes back, it is always possible to produce some new technicality to stop play altogether, which is what Shamir did in March 1990...

...For Shamir, who reached Palestine from an Eastern Europe engulfed in every kind of interethnic hatred, it seems that ultimately no other option carries the weight of reality...

...The sexual overtones of the slogan—Likud virility, Labor impotence—were simply a bonus...

...If Shamir were taken at his word, might he not prove to be another example of a hawk turned peacemaker, a de Gaulle (Algeria), a Nixon (China), a Begin (Egypt...

...and with the territories no longer a source of tourist revenues or even much of a market for Israeli goods, surely a radical change of policy would become inevitable...

...One guess that turned out to be correct was that the intifada was no passing episode, that "the Palestinians can hardly turn back now...

...From Shamir's point of view, his record is a remarkable success story...

...SUMMER • 1991 • 341 Reports from Abroad The kind of Israel that is being entrenched today is best described in Meron Benvenisti's prognostications, which most of us in the "dovish" camp have been reluctant to accept—a country in which two hostile peoples are caught up in a pitiless and unending "tribal war," atavistic and primordial...

...and would no doubt like to do the same again in 1991...

...Beyond this, Shamir has demonstrated as no other Israeli leader had ever dreamed of doing that it is possible to defy the American leadership persistently and fundamentally while nonetheless surviving...

...and, judging by past experience, will not be cut down in the future either...

...The way in which Shamir handled this crisis can be seen as a classic example of his entire modus operandi...

...And he did everything he could to delay the return to Egypt of the tiny strip of sand at Taba, even though the peace treaty had called for the issue to be settled by international arbitration...

...On May 14, 1989, the government endorsed a new peace plan...

...This combination, however improbable on the face of it, appeared to have a certain logic...

...government and the PLO...

...To avoid a surrender of land the Likud (like Labor) might well...

...Unless driven into a corner by some critical situation, he prefers to let sleeping dogs lie and not even to hint at moderation...

...The underlying problems facing Israel remain and can be expected to get worse...

...After about two weeks of such ducking and weaving, Shamir brought the matter to the cabinet, which carried a resolution (over the votes of Sharon, Levy, and Yitzhak Modai) declaring that "the peace initiative . . . [of] May 14 stands and remains in force with no additions and no alterations...

...Where I went wrong was in my argument that the intifada as a long-term phenomenon would make it increasingly difficult and eventually impossible for the Likud party to persist in its policy of "creeping annexation...

...A number of the leaders of the ultra-Orthodox (non-Zionist) camp, such as the rabbis Ovadya Yosef and Eliezer Shakh, had expressed themselves publicly that it was religiously mandated to yield territory for peace and security...

...With the wisdom of hindsight, we can now see that in fact the decisive moment in this story came not in March 1990 but many months earlier...

...Shamir withstood all such pressure and kept the country out of the war...

...Since Egypt and the PLO had long made it clear that this was one point on which they could not yield, Shamir's action had a clear finality...

...This accelerating process was brought to an abrupt halt by the decision of Israeli Prime Minister Shamir to reject a key element in Baker's package: the participation in the Palestinian delegation of at least one East Jerusalem resident and one exile returned from abroad...

...He is a true believer, a fanatic, with regard to aims, but highly calculating, a first-class poker player, when it comes to means...

...The Likud is still holding the center ground and shows no signs of being dislodged...

...Israel's grip on the territories is firm and becoming firmer...

...And almost no Israelis venture into the Arab section of the Old City, let alone the territories, unless they have a very specific reason for doing so...

...The recent period has witnessed the liberation of Eastern Europe from Soviet domination, the crisis of communism in the USSR, the collapse of apartheid in South Africa, the end of the civil war in Nicaragua, the promise of political settlements in Cambodia and El Salvador, even intercommunal talks in Northern Ireland...

...The last three years have certainly brought home to the person in the street that a " 'Greater Israel' is no guarantee whatever of a quiet life...

...For his part, Rabbi Shakh (spiritual leader of the Lithuanian yeshiva movement in Israel) finally ordered his small party (Degel Hatorah) to opt for the Likud, declaring in a speech (half Hebrew, half Yiddish) that the members of the kibbutz movement can hardly be considered Jews at all...

...Sharon agreed not to insist on an opposition vote...

...He would be willing to grant the Palestinian Arabs a limited measure of local self-government if he were convinced that such a step would not open the door to ever-increasing autonomy and eventually even to a Palestinian state...

...It is impossible not to regret the fact that the intifada has with time strayed ever further from the path of mass but nonviolent protest advocated by Mubarak Awad, which would have been far harder to suppress...

...In the short run, however, the Likud, which has always sought to downplay the demographic issue, has received a major morale boost...

...For about two years it looked as though the second, more optimistic of the two scenarios was unfolding, slowly, painfully, but perceptibly...

...His Likud is now in complete control of the government, and the smaller coalition partners are reluctant to rock the boat, knowing that a coalition with Labor is always an alternative...

...In large part because of its defiant foreign policy, the huge loans required to settle the immigrant masses may not be forthcoming...

...The bitterness that he sometimes expresses over this loss (and his tendency to blame it on Peres, who was then minister of foreign affairs) has about it a touch of the pathological...

...Asked to explain how the party decision could be reconciled with that of the government—the one patently contradicted the other—Shamir declared that "all the decisions taken by my movement are valid for the future...

...and it had to be made clear that a final agreement could not include the establishment of a Palestinian state...

...The fact is that the last such international conference, held in Geneva in 1973, provided a convenient and harmless background to Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy of the mid-1970s...

...An important side effect of this decision was that no attempt could be made to use the cover of battle to drive part of the Arab population out of the territories into Jordan...

...Peres was asked by President Chaim Herzog to form a government, and for a brief period it looked as though Labor would lead a new coalition based on the support of the so-called left, on one side, and the ultra-Orthodox parties on the other...

...implying that while the Labor party talked peace, it was the Likud that made it...

...For the next ten months, it looked as though this proposal, soon known as the Shamir peace plan, had set in motion a snowball effect...

...And the choice will increasingly narrow down to either the idea of expulsion...

...or evacuation...

...pressure to be regarded as a total impossibility...

...My predictions about specific issues have held up rather well, but the central theory to which everything else was meant to lead, has—hitherto at least—proved to be totally wrong (A — or B + for the details...

...Had not the time come, perhaps, for a minimalist approach...

...He does this even when Israel has been provided with all kinds of guarantees that such a conference would not be able to dictate terms to the parties involved...

...Awad, of course, was expelled by the Israeli authorities in June 1988...

...The Labor party had long threatened to leave the government if the Likud sabotaged the peace process and, as a result, the government fell to a vote of no confidence on March 15, 1990, by 60 to 55...

...It was on the basis of these casuistic but convenient evasions that the "peace process," the coalition, and close relations with the Bush administration were kept intact for another eight months...

...In advancing his proposals (in the one case for the elections, in the other for a two-tier peace process involving the Arab states and the Palestinians simultaneously), he no doubt sought to win a central place for Israel in American diplomatic strategies...

...The London agreement of 1987 between King Hussein of Jordan and Peres, as well as the Shultz mission of 1988, were both given short shrift on these grounds...

...Professional demographers dispute this view, pointing out that the increase in the Arab population is so rapid that in the long run the Russian immigration will not make a major difference...

...What appeared to be developing in the latter half of 1989 was an indirect form of negotiations between Tunis and Jerusalem, with the United States, Egypt, and Labor party members all seeking ways to bridge the gap, while honoring Shamir's wish that he remain untouched by the process...

...But at that time, I shared the widespread feeling in Israel that we were witnessing events of momentous importance and that I really had to venture some guesses about the future...

...And increasingly the uprising is becoming bogged down in intra-Arab strife...

...It is a safe guess that if the Likud remains in a coalition with Labor it will sooner or later have to modify some of its positions...

...The new Bush administration decided that the idea should become the cornerstone of a new peace initiative...

...Christian pilgrims want to go to East Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem...

...In the Israeli political context, it had the enormous advantage of representing the lowest common denominator on which the Likud and Labor could agree—symptomatically, it was opposed in the government by Levy and Sharon on the right and by Ezer Weizman on the left...

...I heard it argued that the leaders of such parties as Aguda had (going all the way back to interwar Poland) always felt a healthy respect for the powers-that-be (that is, the "goyim") and that they 338 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad would not now be ready to follow Shamir into a head-on collision with the United States led by two Texans like Bush and Baker...

...As one taxi driver said to me the other day (taxi drivers are widely quoted by the Israeli intelligentsia): "The intifada keeps going on...

...That the police fired plastic bullets into, and stampeded, part of the crowd near the Damascus Gate only seemed to underline the fact that with crucial decisions on the way, nerves were becoming frayed...

...He does not have a charismatic presence...

...In such a period, only a fool would predict that Shamir's type of policies will dominate Israel indefinitely (after all, is massive U.S...

...It turns out that the frequent tendency to underrate Yitzhak Shamir as a politician, to regard him as indecisive or as lacking the quality of leadership is a major mistake...

...Unemployment is rising fast...

...His one overriding goal is to maintain Israeli possession of all the Occupied Territories...

...What land Israel holds it should keep and where practicable, without causing too much uproar, settle with Jewish villages and towns...

...Shamir was to demand an endorsement of the government's peace initiative...