Comments on the Mideast peace agreement

...That he chose to gamble everything on a full-scale accord with Yasir Arafat was truly astonishing...

...Even at the most mundane level, it is simply very hard for Israelis to believe the evidence of their eyes or ears...

...Given these circumstances, nothing would have been more natural for Rabin than to decide that discretion was the better part of valor, and to opt for an inch-by-inch approach to the peace process...

...Until September 13 it was a criminal offense to possess such flags even in the privacy of one's home...

...With the greatest difficulty, Labor finally induced one of the ultrareligious parties, Shas, to join the coalition government—thus providing the prime minister with the sixty20 • DISSENT Politics Abroad seven seats he regarded as the barest minimum...

...Shamir and a number of other Likud leaders denounced the agreement in the most furious terms as a betrayal of three thousand years of Jewish WINTER • 1994 • 21 Politics Abroad history...

...The danger is that the spiral of violence will spin out of control...

...in Cairo meeting Arafat...

...If the peace process continues to advance, their ranking will change out of all recognition...

...A high percentage had been bused in from the Occupied Territories...

...Can Israeli radio really be carrying reports from its own correspondents in the PLO headquarters in Tunis or from the Hashemite capital, Amman...

...More plausibly, suggestions are now being made in the press that the government, even at this stage, should offer financial compensation to those settlers who would rather leave the territories than live in an Arab autonomous region...

...EDS...

...Yisrael Galili advocated similar policies in the Gaza strip...

...The path of peace was thus left as perhaps Arafat's only way out...

...Rabin tried this tactic in 1977, and Labor lost power for the next fifteen years...

...It is not just the element of constant surprise, though, that lends the recent developments their aura of unreality...

...Their careers in public life go back some forty years, and, until September, they had won for themselves only very modest political reputations...

...But this strategy has already run into major difficulties...

...Only the outbreak of the Arab uprising, the Intifada, later that year, reopened the entire issue of the Occupied Territories...

...So long as there is a prospect of an overall peace settlement on all fronts complete with full diplomatic recognition, adequate security arrangements, and an end to the Arab economic boycott, the government will possibly be able to keep the people behind it...

...In the meantime, the mere fact of their cooperation meant that the difficult campaign to win public support in Israel for the Oslo agreement was launched with far greater success than could have reasonably been anticipated...

...It is as if the two leaders, who in their youth worked for many years in close association with David Ben Gurion, have finally, with the approach of old age, decided to act with his decision, courage, determination, and vision...

...But as recently as 1991, Yitzhak Shamir and his Likud party appeared to be WINTER • 1994 • 19 Politics Abroad solidly entrenched in power, and moving ahead with plans for the still more rapid expansion of Jewish settlement in the administered territories...

...But, in fact, none of this materialized...

...isbelief, incredulity, amazement—it is with such emotions that Israelis have responded to the fast flow of political developments since the announcement in September of the Oslo agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO...

...But Shas, of course, is the most notoriously unreliable of partners, harried simultaneously by its hawkish constituency (the party represents primarily Jews of North African origin) and by the police (of its top leadership, one member is in jail and two others under indictment for various forms of corruption...

...There has been some talk of early elections, but in Israel pre-election campaigns last at least three months, making the final outcome utterly unpredictable...

...In political terms, the protest, representing as it did a clearly definable and small minority of the population, had to be counted a failure...

...student of mine recently reminded me that I had said to her at the time that while she would no doubt live to see the collapse of the occupation, I was not sure that I (in my mid-fifties) would do so...

...The deaths have a devastating effect on public opinion, which had hoped that the peace accord would significantly reduce the level of terror...

...Arab rejectionist organizations (the Hamas and Islamic Jihad) have launched a successful terrorist campaign, claiming new Israeli victims every week...

...If this fact was not understood in 1990, it received dramatic illustration with the Gulf War of early 1991 and the destruction of the Iraqi army by the United States...

...Rabin is received in the royal palace in Rabat with all due pomp by the King of Morocco...

...At the party conference held a few months before the election in 1992, the prominent group of doves in the party, led by Haim Ramon (now minister of health), almost walked out of the party in despair...

...And Jewish settlers have responded by blocking roads in the Occupied Territories and stoning, burning—or even shooting at—Arab cars...

...True, the negotiations for a final settlement are only to begin in two years, but by then Palestinian rule in the territories, backed up by its own police force, will be a fait accompli...

...Worse still, six members of that bloc were elected by the Arab citizenry of Israel, and Rabin had made it clear that he was unwilling to negotiate peace unless backed by a majority of the Jewish population...

...What can be done to prevent so grim a scenario...

...After all, Arafat is to receive not only Jericho, an integral part of the holy land (Eretz Yisrael) right away, but also a very large measure of autonomy in all the remaining territories, East Jerusalem apart, occupied by Israel since the Six Day War...

...The idea was clever, fitting the tactic so favored by Henry Kissinger, of "constructive ambiguity...

...It was Ben Gurion who from 1937 onward consistently pursued the partition of Palestine as the only viable solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict...

...Subsequently, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy provided Rabin and Peres (then prime minister and defense minister respectively) with a crash course in the give-and-take of negotiation with Egypt and Syria (already at that stage led by Assad...

...The second, by Elia Zureik, a professor of sociology at Queen's University in Canada, who served on the Palestinian delegation to the Refugee Working Group of the Multilateral Peace Talks, reflects the views of those diaspora Palestinians who have decided to support the peace agreement...

...It is commonly joked here that the fact that Rabin was willing to make peace with Arafat was nothing compared with his readiness to enter into a real working partnership with Peres...

...A Ph.D...

...The surprise attack and initial defeats during the Yom Kippur War of 1973 did much to shake the overweening self-confidence and mindless complacency that had prevailed during the previous six years...

...Thus when Peres, as foreign minister in the national unity government, came up with his plan in 1987 for an international peace conference with Jordan, Yitzhak Shamir, the prime minister, had no difficulty in dismissing the idea out of hand...

...Speed and hyperactivity are factors built into the Oslo accord...

...There are constant rumors that outline agreements have been worked out with both Syria and Jordan...

...22 • DISSENT Politics Abroad The political leadership now being provided by Rabin and Peres is in extraordinary contrast to anything we have been since the Six Day War of 1967...

...There was one huge protest demonstration in Jerusalem, very impressive in itself, but the crowds were made up almost entirely of religious men and women (easily identifiable by their headgear...

...For a government with an effective majority of one, such a prospect is truly a nightmare...

...on an official visit to China...

...Certainly, such a response would have been in full accord with his past record both as prime minister from 1974 to 1977 and then again as defense minister in the national unity governments of the 1980s...

...There the prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, is regularly denounced as a "traitor...

...Can the Palestinian flag really be flying from innumerable houses not only in the West Bank and Gaza, but also in Arab quarters of Jerusalem...

...The subsequent decision of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states to starve the PLO of financial resources in retaliation for its support of Saddam Hussein brought that organization close to disaster by 1993...

...As for the diplomatic contacts, there, too, the news has come thick and fast, one event more unexpected than the next...

...Speaking at last in one voice, these two ancient rivals exude a self-confidence and youthful buoyancy that carry great conviction...

...in Indonesia (the most populous Islamic state in the world...

...Such a move would have the advantage of honesty—the final treaty to be concluded within five years will hardly leave most of the settlements under Israeli jurisdiction—and at the same time it would prevent the formation of a united front of the entire settler population, which now numbers the formidable figure of over one hundred thousand...

...With the Likud reentrenched in its Greater Israel policies during the 1980s, Labor found it impossible to outbid its hawkishness, and yet unpopular to sound too dovish...

...Besides, support for the agreement is dropping with alarming speed...

...When Menachem Begin, as prime minister, subsequently annexed the Golan Heights, many Labor MPs considered it quite natural to vote with him...

...Does not this clearly mean a giant step toward a Palestinian state, perhaps federated with Jordan, in the entire area across the "green line" (the pre-1967 frontier...

...He was not even deterred by his knowledge that the Oslo agreement had been negotiated by a team working under the direction of the foreign minister, Shimon Peres, whose bitter rivalry with Rabin over the last twenty years has become notorious...

...The public response to the accords between Israel and the PLO provided yet another surprise...

...The basic conception underlying the Israeli negotiating strategy at Oslo was to implement the most popular measures first and to put off the most controversial issues to later...

...And it won only by the skin of its teeth four years later...

...A nation of four million Jews, part of the Western world and committed to democratic principles, could hardly have maintained a harsh military dictatorship over nearly two million Arabs forever...

...Yigal Allon championed the religious Jews, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who settled next to Hebron...

...Of course, there would be no mourning a withdrawal from Gaza, a hotbed of bitter protest and murderous violence, but surely the rest of the plan would be angrily rejected by much of the population...

...Both men are in their seventies and presumably have concluded that this is their last chance to earn a place in the pantheon of Israel's front-rank statesmen...

...Gaza was to be evacuated now...

...This setback, in turn, threw the Likud into a state of major disarray...

...Although the Labor party rallied behind Peres and Rabin, three Knesset members of the Likud—including Ronni Milo, since elected, not coincidentally, mayor of Tel Aviv—chose to abstain in the crucial vote on the Oslo accords...

...Among Jewish settlers on the maximalist right, where the slogans are "Greater Israel" and "peace for peace," the prevailing mood is one of shock, desperation, and the blackest anger...

...He is not likely to repeat it if he has any choice...

...The great number of Likud supporters chose to stay at home...

...and, shortly thereafter, Peres, who had no chance whatsoever of winning an election, almost defeated the far more popular Rabin for nomination as party leader...

...and the future of the Jewish settlements and of Jerusalem to be raised only after an interval of two years...

...Shimon Peres took the ultranationalist Gush Emunim under his wing and made possible the establishment of Ofrah...

...Even though Arafat has been systematically demonized here for decades—a task much facilitated by the many brutal massacres carried out by the PLO over the years as well as by his cultivatedly unshaven appearance—over 65 percent of the Jewish population (according to the polls) initially supported the Oslo agreement...

...Nobody here assumes that it will be easy for the government to maintain a favorable level of public support for the peace process...

...and only two months were set aside for Israel and the PLO to agree on the specifics of the military redeployment in the areas of Jericho and Gaza...

...In the meantime, its best bet is probably to keep up the breakneck momentum of its diplomatic activity, to keep the newspapers flooded with exciting headlines of imminent breakthroughs, and so to keep the opposition off balance...

...On the Israeli right, it was assumed at first that there would be a massive outbreak of protest against the peace pact...

...The first, by Jonathan Frankel, a professor of history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, an activist in Peace Now, and a regular contributor to Dissent, reflects the views of the Israeli left...

...So glaring a clarification of the issues, though, is something that the government would clearly prefer to postpone if it can...

...All that Israel might then be able to achieve would be very minor border changes...

...The party leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, who at first moved toward the extreme right in response to the pact, now found himself with little choice but to edge back sheepishly toward the center...

...Predictably, retaliation of this kind undermines, in turn, support for the agreement on the Arab side...

...Calls for wide-scale civil disobedience or worse (meri ezrahi) were in the air...

...From then on, Labor had a fighting chance to sell the idea of "territory for peace" to the Israeli public...

...Of course, in some ultimate sense, sub specie aeternitatis, the situation in the West Bank and Gaza as it existed before September 13 was untenable...

...The disintegration of the communist system in Europe was clearly of supreme importance...

...It tried and failed, with Shimon Peres as its leader, in 1988...

...Worse, had not the Israeli government agreed to include Jerusalem in the final negotiations, implying that the Palestinian entity will have some legitimate claims there...

...He asked us to make it clear that his argument here is solely his own...

...Politics Abroad Can a team made up of some of France's greatest athletes really be playing a soccer match against Palestine before a wildly cheering crowd of perhaps thirty thousand on an improvised field in Jericho—the minuscule town projected as Arafat's temporary capital...

...surely that is enough, he said, to make judgments on the vital issues of war and peace...

...After all that, the final tally in the Knesset elections of June in that year gave Labor and its satellite parties the narrowest possible majority-61 out of 120...

...It took many painful lessons and much internal party strife to bring Labor to its present stance...

...A multiplicity of different factors, some deep-rooted and structural, but others a matter of sheer luck, had to come together to make possible the events we are now witnessing...

...on a boat in the Red Sea to meet King Hussein...

...while Yitzhak Rabin (likewise in the mid-1970s) was responsible for the town in the Judean desert, Maaleh Adumim...

...The entire settlement project, after all, was launched and lent legitimacy by the leaders of that party...

...In the territories, a similar percentage of the Palestinians was apparently in favor, and there the first outburst of enthusiasm involved large-scale celebrations in the streets...

...The basic idea of the autonomy agreement, he now decided, was, perhaps, acceptable, but everything had to be done to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, to protect the status quo in Jerusalem, and to guarantee the continued existence of the settlements linked to Israel...

...Denied the powerful support of the Soviet bloc, Syria and the PLO had to conclude that the military option was becoming increasingly implausible...

...Asked by a television interviewer why the army command had not been involved in the Oslo negotiations, Peres replied coolly that when he and Rabin meet together the room contains two prime ministers (Peres was premier from 1984 to 1986), two defense ministers, one chief of staff (Rabin headed the army during the Six Day War), and one foreign minister...

...On the so-called left, where the slogan is "land for peace," there has been an extraordinary upsurge of hope, and the talk, at least in the first few weeks after the White House ceremony, was all of the "messianic days" —a hyperbole used even by secular Jews when all other terms fail to match the magnitude of (promising) events...

...and word is out that the very survival of Zionism and the Jewish state is hanging in the balance...

...And Begin later shocked the Labor party by temporarily outflanking it on the left and concluding his full peace treaty with Anwar Sadat...

...To anybody who has watched the conduct of the Israeli Labor party in the twenty-six years since the Six Day War, what is now happening is, if anything, still more remarkable...