Defines The Four Wars Of Israel/Palestine
Walzer, Michael
THE GREAT SIMPLIFIERS are hard at work, but Israel/Palestine has never been a friendly environment for them, and it is especially unfriendly today. They are bound to get it wrong, morally and...
...But clearly, whatever his ultimate intentions, he is right now a supporter or at least an accomplice of terrorism...
...The fourth war is a real war...
...Terrorism isn't best understood as a negotiating strategy...
...Most Israelis choose to be literal-minded about this, arguing that acceptance of the right would open the way to the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, overwhelming the current Jewish majority...
...But the supporters of the settlers, especially the religious supporters, are radical in exactly the same way...
...What is crucial is to acknowledge the four...
...he has always drawn support from the Palestinian diaspora...
...all the opinion polls show a massive unwillingness to do that...
...Among Palestinians, only Sari Nuseibeh, the PA's representative in Jerusalem, has been ready to argue that giving up the right of return is the necessary price of statehood...
...But the legitimacy of Israeli self-defense will finally be determined by the size of the "self'—the extent of the territory—that is being defended...
...But the risk might still be worth taking...
...When, instead, the government sponsored and supported settlements beyond the old border (the green line), it conferred legitimacy on a resistance movement aimed at liberation...
...And that is why it was successful in advancing the peace process—though Palestinian leaders subsequently declined, so it seems to me, to gather the fruits of their success...
...So this second war is a real war too, though again it isn't clear that Arafat is committed to it...
...It is possible, of course, that Sharon exploited the fear of terrorism in order to fight a different war than the one his soldiers thought they were fighting...
...It is in this sense only that they are like the terrorists: they want the whole thing...
...And the longer the occupation went on, the more settlements proliferated and expanded, the more land was expropriated and water rights seized, the stronger that movement grew...
...It was not exactly a nonviolent struggle (though it was sometimes described that way by people who weren't watching), but it did show discipline and high morale, and its protagonists seemed to acknowledge limits to their struggle: it wasn't intended to threaten Israelis on their side of the green line, where most Israelis lived...
...Still, the interviews that journalists have conducted with many of the fighters suggest that they (or some of them) consider themselves to be fighting to end the occupation and force the settlers to leave...
...So it is certainly a legitimate goal of Palestinian militants to establish a state of their own, free of Israel—and of Egypt and Jordan too...
...There isn't one war going on in the Middle East, and there isn't a single opposition of right and wrong, just and unjust...
...So perhaps someone else could provide a more adequate account of the four wars...
...Before 1967, they needed a state to protect them against Egypt (in Gaza) and Jordan (on the West Bank...
...How to get there, and how to make sure that both sides stay there once they get there—on these questions the disagreements are profound, between Palestinians and Israelis and also within both groups...
...Does he want what some, at least, of his people certainly want: a small state alongside a small (but not as small) Israeli state...
...That seems to me the right position, since the claim to return effectively reopens the 1947-1948 conflict, which is not a helpful thing to do more than half a century later...
...MICHAEL WALZER is co-editor of Dissent...
...Most commentators, especially on the European left, but also on the Jewish and Christian right here in the United States, have failed to do that, producing instead ideological caricatures of the conflict...
...The general terms are clear enough: Palestinians must renounce terrorism...
...At Taba in January 2001 both sides did talk about numbers and, apparently, the figures suggested by the two were very far apart...
...In any case, all four wars are now in progress: what can we say about them...
...1. The war against Israel: this is the war that is "declared" every time a terrorist attacks Israeli civilians...
...it aims instead at total victory, unconditional surrender...
...But the extent of the terror attacks now requires the Palestinians to find some convincing way to repudiate the slogan that still echoes at their demonstrations: "Kill the Jews...
...The conduct of the battles seems to have conformed to the standards of just war theory, though the use of air power (for example, against the Gaza apartment house in July) has not always done so...
...I put war number one, for the de30 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 struction of the state of Israel, ahead of war number two, for statehood in the territories, because it appears that statehood could have been achieved without any war at all...
...and that victory would have been definitive...
...The Israeli settlers would have to be de32 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 feated before any such force came in, because the border along which it was deployed would certainly exclude many of the existing settlements...
...And what then...
...Four Israeli-Palestinian wars are now in progress...
...That prospect is the obvious danger of any unilateralism, and it is a real danger, as the withdrawal from Lebanon demonstrates...
...Israel's Jewish citizens have to assume that something similar is what Palestinian terrorists are seeking today: the end of the Jewish state, the removal of the Jews...
...Israelis must renounce occupation...
...The claim that the Palestinians were offered nothing more than a disconnected set of "Bantustans" seems to be false...
...What happened at Camp David is obviously important in shaping our moral judgments of the two sides and the four wars, for it was Barak's inability to conclude an agreement there that sealed his fate and brought Sharon to power...
...he may even hope one day to kill or exile them as the Algerian government did to its terrorists in the aftermath of independence...
...As it was, the fierce argument about the massacre-that-never-happened in Jenin obscured the real moral issue, which was not the conduct of the battles but the political vision of the government that ordered them...
...Barak failed to make peace and was defeated (we can learn something about the constituencies of the two men from this contrast...
...The aim of the fourth war is to enforce this conception of belonging...
...Arafat's insistence that return is a make-or-break issue must be directed in part at them...
...Democratic elections in Palestine may well play into the hands of nationalist and religious demagogues...
...Still, they may well be the crucial constituency for war number one...
...I don't understand it...
...They also have no interest in the green line...
...They argue that there is a way to defend Israeli citizens and to signal, at the same time, a readiDISSENT / Fall 2002 n 31 POLITICS ABROAD ness to return to some modified version of the 1967 border...
...The people who were at the table disagree among themselves...
...It isn't a crazy conclusion that he simply wasn't interested in or, when the critical moment came, wasn't prepared for a historic compromise and an end to the conflict— even if the compromise brought with it a sovereign state on the West Bank and Gaza...
...The rest must finally be resettled...
...THE FIRST WAR has to be defeated or definitively renounced...
...The 95 percent response was the direct product of the terrorist attacks...
...The second is a Palestinian war to create an independent state alongside Israel, ending the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza...
...this is a real possibility in Israel too...
...The Palestinians need a state...
...In battle, however, the Israeli army regularly accepted risks to its own men in order to reduce the risks that it imposed on the civilian population...
...Different people are fighting each of the 26 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 four wars at the same time, side by side, though the overall emphasis falls differently at different times...
...In March 2002, more than 95 percent of them did show up...
...The current occupation of Palestinian cities and the practice of collective punishment impose unjustifiable hardships on the civilian population...
...And that is certainly true: the radicals object to Jewish sovereignty on any part of "Arab" territory...
...The first is a Palestinian war to destroy the state of Israel...
...There will continue to be a Palestinian diaspora, just as there continues to be a Jewish diaspora...
...A unilateral withdrawal from isolated settlements in Gaza and the West Bank would instantly improve Israel's defensive position, shortening the lines that the army has to patrol, and it would provoke the political battle with the settlers that (as I have already argued) should have been fought years ago...
...These people did not believe that they were fighting for the occupied territories and the settlements...
...since then, all four wars have been actively in progress...
...Return, they claim, means two Palestinian states...
...Would it help to bring in an international force, under UN auspices, to police the (temporary or permanent) lines between Israel and Palestine...
...I believe that terrorism always announces a radical devaluation of the people who are targeted for random murder: Irish Protestants in the heyday of the IRA, Europeans in Algeria during the National Liberation Front's (FLN) campaign for independence, Americans on September 11...
...in a sense, the four are simultaneous...
...But the territories that Israel controlled at the end of its victorious defense were supposed to be used (this is what its leaders said at the time) as bargaining chips toward a future peace...
...The way to peace begins with these two internal (but not necessarily uncoordinated) battles...
...Here, however, there is disagreement among the participants: was Arafat insisting on a symbolic acceptance of the right or on an actual return...
...Taken separately, two of the wars are just and two are unjust...
...at some point, certainly, the welcome must be mutual...
...There was no occupation in those days...
...he may think that he is using the terrorists...
...But if the Palestinians make a serious effort to repress the terrorist organizations, and if that effort does not move the Sharon government to rethink its position on the territories, then these orderings would have to be revised...
...But there is a significant peace movement in Israel, and several political parties committed to renunciation, and among the Palestinians, though no comparable movement exists, there are at least small signs of opposition to the terror attacks...
...The renewed intifada that began in the fall of 2000 is a violent struggle, and it is not confined to the Occupied Territories...
...Does he want to worry about the water supply in Jericho and the development of an industrial zone in Nablus...
...And everybody's plan (leaving aside those Palestinians and Israelis who are fighting for the whole thing) is more or less the same...
...In fact, neither renunciation seems likely given the existing leadership of the two sides...
...Sharon's behavior since coming to power doesn't suggest a hopeful answer to this question...
...That dependence, it seems to me, is morally clear...
...a gradual out-migration of settler families from the territories would have begun...
...If the Palestinians were able to create a state on their side of the green line, would they (or a sufficient majority of them) regard that as the fulfillment of their national aspirations...
...They are prepared to fight for the whole thing, and some Israelis presumably believe that that is what they are doing right now...
...Internationalization is no substitute for that victory, and it is certainly doomed to failure if it follows upon the victory of Israeli moderates only...
...It is time to address their actual misery rather than their symbolic claims...
...A lot depends on the questions I have not answered: how many Israelis, how many Palestinians, endorse each of the wars...
...But many other people have responded differently to the same experience: there is an ongoing argument among Palestinians (as there was in the IRA and the Algerian FLN) about the usefulness and moral legitimacy of terror...
...They thought that they would most easily defeat the right-wing POLITICS ABROAD supporters of Greater Israel if they waited until the very end of the peace process...
...If, instead, they had frozen settlement activity and chosen a few isolated settlements to dismantle, they would have provoked a political battle that I am sure they would have won...
...Intellectuals committed to internationalism can best serve their cause by explaining and defending the two messages together...
...I hasten to add that it is not the moral equivalent...
...What kind of judgments can we make about whom to support or oppose, and when...
...It is easy to predict what would happen next: terrorists will slip through the UN's multinational patrols and kill Israeli civilians...
...But the message of settler activity to the Palestinians is very much like the message of terrorism to the Israelis: we want you to leave (some groups on the Israeli right, including groups represented in Sharon's government, openly support a policy of "transfer"), or we want you to accept a radically subordinate position in your own country...
...its potential supporters are more and more skeptical about its central claim: that withdrawal from the territories would bring a real peace...
...If there ever is a foreign intervention in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, one of its goals should be to clarify the relaPOLITICS ABROAD tionship of the first and second wars (and also of the third and fourth...
...At some point, a Palestinian leader (it is unlikely to be Arafat) will have to do what Anwar Sadat did in 1977: welcome Israel as a Middle Eastern neighbor...
...Perhaps some number of refugees will return to Israel, some greater number to Palestine (how many will depend on the pace of investment and economic development...
...The settlers are not murderers, even if there are a small number of terrorists among them...
...Egyptian publicists talked openly of driving the Jews "into the sea...
...the routine pressures of civilian life— sick children, infirm parents, school exams, trouble at the office—are accepted as excuses...
...The problem is that many Israelis, who would share this hope if they were hopeful about anything, don't believe, and don't have much reason to believe, that the answer is yes...
...it finds itself marginalized...
...Throughout the course of the Oslo peace process, some Palestinians and some Israelis were fighting the first and fourth of these wars—or, at least, were committed to fighting them (and their will to contend was sufficiently known so that it could have been dealt with...
...the conflict could have only one ending: either the Palestinians or the Israelis would have to go...
...HOW CAN WE adjudicate among the four wars...
...This first war is a real war, even if it looks right now like a losing war with terrible consequences for the Palestinian people and even if some (or many) Palestinians believe themselves to be fighting a different war...
...But the Palestinian terrorists would not have to be defeated, because they sit comfortably on one side of the line...
...The settlers' aim is Greater Israel, and the achievement of that aim would mean that there could not be a Palestinian state...
...since 1967, they need a state to protect them against Israel...
...In the face of terror, the left cannot mobilize opposition to the settlements...
...But it was a morally necessary prelude to that war that the Sharon government declare its political commitment to end the occupation and bring the settlers home (many of them, at least: the actual number will depend on a negotiated agreement on final borders for the two states...
...The third war is a real war and, morally, a very important war: a defense of home and family in the most immediate sense...
...A clear statement by Arafat acknowledging this simple truth would represent a big step toward undeclaring the first war...
...Meanwhile they compromised with the right and allowed a steady growth in the number of settlers...
...Is this what Yasir Arafat is really after...
...In the near future, this withdrawal is more likely to take shape as a leftist program than as a government policy, but it would still begin the necessary battle inside Israel, and it might encourage Palestinian oppositionists to begin a battle of their own: a serious effort to rein in the terrorist organizations so that the Israeli withdrawal, when it finally comes, does not generate a wave of enthusiasm among the militants and then a series of new attacks...
...And some (or many) of them are...
...ALMOST EVERYBODY has a peace plan: one peace for the four wars...
...Perhaps whatever forward movement is possible must come independently from the two sides and, first of all, from outside what we used to call the "ruling circles...
...Arafat refused to make peace and survived...
...The caricatures would be easy to ridicule, if they did not have such deadly effects...
...For analytic purposes, we can begin by looking at them one by one, but we won't be able to stop there...
...The March-April 2002 attacks on West Bank cities, and the return of Israeli soldiers to those same cities in June-July, would be much easier to defend if it was clear that the aim was not to maintain the occupation but only to end or reduce the terrorist threat...
...lots of reservists don't show up...
...For the settler movement is the functional equivalent of the terrorist organizations...
...The reserve call-up that preceded the March-April 2002 Israeli "incursions" into West Bank cities and towns produced a startling result...
...The right responds by claiming that this was always the view of Palestinian radicals, even before there were any settlements beyond the old border...
...Still, I suspect that most of the reservists called up in March, or those who are now (August) patrolling Palestinian cities, would not be prepared to fight for those goals if they thought that this was the only war in which they were engaged...
...Then Israel will demand that UN soldiers go after the terrorist organizations, which, since that would involve a major military campaign, they would refuse to do...
...Failing that, Palestinian radicals were able to convince many of their people that compromise was impossible...
...There have been too many excuses for terrorism, too many efforts to "understand" terror as a response (terrible, of course) to the oppressiveness of the occupation...
...The actual decision to restart the battles was taken by the Palestinians in September 2000...
...And the occupation was far more onerous, far more oppressive when its reality was denied than when it was called by its true name...
...The current boycott campaign against Israel, modeled on the 1980s campaign against South Africa, aims at a very one-sided delegitimation...
...It isn't easy to read him...
...In the absence of a Palestinian war on terror, an Israeli war is certainly justifiable...
...Perhaps UN officials would have condemned the Israeli war anyway, whatever the government's declared commitments, but the condemnations could then have been seen as acts of hostility—not to be confused with serious moral judgments...
...It is worth recalling how peaceful the occupation was in its early days, how few soldiers it required when it was believed, on both sides, to be temporary (and when war number one had been decisively defeated...
...It isn't easy to say which war is being fought at any given moment...
...The Israeli nationalist right, even the religious right, is a familiar enemy for me, whereas the ideology of death and martyrdom endorsed by so many Palestinians today is alien...
...And that skepticism opens the way for rightwing politicians to defend the settlements— which are no different, they argue, from cities and towns on the Israeli side of the green line: if we don't fight for Ariel and Kiryat Arbah (Jewish towns on the West Bank), we will have to fight for Tel Aviv and Haifa...
...I have no private information to bring to this argument...
...It is true that the state of the negotiations and the proposals on the table at Camp David and Taba are still in dispute...
...Palestinian sympathizers on the European left and elsewhere should be very careful not to join this argument on the side of the terrorists...
...The contrast with the way the Russians fought in Grozny, to take the most recent example of large-scale urban warfare, is striking, and the crucial mark of that contrast is the very small number of civilian casualties in the Palestinian cities despite the fierceness of the fighting...
...he cannot be surprised if ordinary Israelis feel radically threatened...
...The vote of the Likud in May 2002 to bar any future Israeli government from accepting a Palestinian state suggests a strong commitment to continue the occupation and enlarge the settlements...
...There have to be two states, divided by a border close to the green line, with changes mutually agreed upon...
...They are also continuous...
...Except in the most general terms, I cannot address these questions...
...Usually the army calls up about twice the number of soldiers that it needs...
...they have no interest in the green line...
...They have condemned each successive terrorist attack on Israeli civilians, often in stronger language than Arafat has used, but they have not recognized, let alone condemned, the succession itself, the attacks taken together, as an unjust war against the very existence of Israel...
...DISSENT / Fall 2002 n 33...
...I cannot pretend to POLITICS ABROAD perfect objectivity...
...Since Israel already exists, and Palestine doesn't, one might expect the welcome to come from the other direction...
...A note to European critics of Ariel Sharon: on any account, including that of Palestinian oppositionists, Arafat is more involved in the terrorist campaign than Sharon was in the Sabra and Shatilla massacre...
...it tells us 28 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 only that Palestinian terrorism is a political disaster for the Israeli left...
...It is critically important to delegitimize the terrorists and the settlers...
...Most Palestinians argue for the importance of the symbolism and seem eager to postpone any discussion of numbers...
...Does he want to trade in the aura of heroic struggle for the routine drudgery of statebuilding...
...I have no doubt about this, nor about the Palestinian right to the state they need, even though I believe that the original seizure of the West Bank and Gaza was justified...
...it hasn't always been politically clear...
...the government adopted the ideology of conquest and settlement...
...His distancing gestures, the occasional arrests, and the perfunctory condemnations after each attack long ago ceased to be convincing...
...Those of us who watch and worry about the Middle East have at least an obligation not to do that...
...Still, a more open politics among the Palestinians would allow public expressions of support for a compromise peace, and that would be a major advance...
...uLTIMATELY, the partisans of wars two and three must defeat the partisans of wars one and four...
...Critics of Israel in Europe and at the United Nations have made a terrible mistake, a moral as well as a political mistake, in failing to acknowledge the necessity of this defeat...
...And because the other side isn't led by an organization remotely like the African National Congress, or by a man remotely like Nelson Mandela, the success of this campaign would be disastrous...
...The third is an Israeli war for the security of Israel within the 1967 borders...
...This is an increasingly popular idea, but it raises difficult questions about reciprocity...
...Or, perhaps better, we might ask: what would happen if each side won its own just war...
...What follows is a hard argument, and I don't make it with any confidence...
...If the answer DISSENT / Fall 2002 • 2 POLITICS ABROAD to these questions is yes, then we should all hope that Arafat gets what he wants...
...2. The war for an independent state: this is the war that leftist sympathizers in Europe and America commonly claim that the Palestinians are fighting, because they think that this is the war the Palestinians should be fighting...
...But they don't appear separately in the "real world...
...I have tried to reflect the complexity of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict...
...their aim is an independent state alongside Israel...
...And I put the war for Greater Israel after the defensive war for Israeli security because the previous Israeli government was prepared to renounce territorial "greatness" entirely...
...But this has to be done simultaneously and with some modicum of moral intelligence...
...So the decision to walk away from the process and to begin, and then to militarize, the second intifada is very hard to understand—especially hard because we have to assume that Arafat knew that Palestinian violence guaranteed the defeat of Barak's centerleft government...
...The Palestinians can have a state only when they make it clear to the Israelis that the state they want is one that stands alongside Israel...
...Palestinians are still in camps because a decision was made, by their own leaders and by the adjacent Arab states, to keep them there: this was a way of insisting that Israel's independence war was not yet over...
...There is a form of international engagement, more ideological and political than military, that could be genuinely helpful...
...Only when European critics of Israel are prepared to tell the Palestinians that there will be no help for a PA complicit in terrorism, can they ask American critics of the Palestinians to deliver a parallel message to the Israeli government...
...Still, whatever the war in Sharon's mind, a substantial part of the Israeli army was defending the country against the terrorist threat...
...They believed that they were fighting for their country or, perhaps better, for their safety and survival in their country...
...It is likely, indeed, that some terrorists are motivated by personal encounters with the occupying forces or by a more general sense of the humiliation of being occupied...
...the whole land was the Land of Israel...
...All the other refugees from the years immediately after World War Two, from Central Europe to Southeast Asia, have been successfully resettled...
...So, the only force likely to be deployed is one organized for peacekeeping, not peace-making, and then its effectiveness will depend on the previous victory of Israeli and Palestinian moderates...
...But the fight for Ariel and Kiryat Arbah guarantees that there won't be a real peace...
...they oppose Arab sovereignty on any part of the land that historically or by divine gift "belongs" to the Jewish people...
...Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David in 2000 believed that he would win a referendum for an almost total withdrawal, if this were part of a negotiated settlement of the conflict as a whole...
...No state can fail to defend the lives of its citizens (that's what states are for...
...But it seems reasonably clear that each successive move in the negotiating process brought the Palestinians nearer to statehood and sovereign control over something close to (and with each move closer to) the whole of the territories...
...Return" was probably a crucial factor in the failure of the Camp David negotiations in the late summer of 2000...
...All good things don't come together in political life: some of the most moderate Palestinians are among the most corrupt, while the suicide bombers are no doubt idealists...
...I need to say something about the "right of return," even though the refugees who claim this right, since they mostly live beyond the borders of old Palestine, are not directly involved in any of the four wars...
...They are bound to get it wrong, morally and politically, and that is a very bad thing to do, for the stakes are high...
...But some Israeli homes and families are located on the wrong side of the green line, where their defense is morally problematic...
...An American or American/European-sponsored truce would help the moderates on both sides, but, at the same time, the success of the truce depends on the strength of the moderates...
...3. The war for Israeli security: it is unclear how many Israeli soldiers think that this is the war they are fighting, but the number is certainly high...
...A decade later, Prime Minister Menachem Begin denied that there was any such thing as "occupied territory...
...Similarly, does the Israeli defense of statehood stop at the green line, or does the current government's conception of state security (or historical destiny) require territories beyond that, even far beyond that...
...But can it be called the goal POLITICS ABROAD of the Palestinian liberation movement taken as a whole...
...The first intifada (1987), with its stone-throwing children, looked like a struggle for a state of this kind, limited to the West Bank and Gaza, where the children lived...
...Withdrawal under pressure of terrorist attacks probably does not have similar support, but that tells us nothing about the extent of support for the occupation and the settlements...
...I shall simply repeat what some of my friends in the Israeli peace movement are now saying (I can't speak for Palestinian oppositionists...
...Would they accept that kind of statehood as the end of the conflict, or would the new state sponsor an irredentist politics and secretly DISSENT / Fall 2002 n 29 POLITICS ABROAD collude in an ongoing terrorist war...
...Perhaps it should...
...Our moral and political judgments have to reflect this complexity...
...4. The war for the Occupied Territories: the Israeli right is definitely committed to this war, but the support they have in the country is (again) uncertain...
...The UN's record in Bosnia, Rwanda, and East Timor is appalling...
...Right now, it is hard to judge whether the "reform" of the Palestinian Authority would increase that strength...
...The relation of the third and fourth wars is symmetrical to that of the first and second: war number four, for Greater Israel, must be lost or definitively renounced if war number three, for Israel itself, is to be won...
...The fourth is an Israeli war for Greater Israel, for the settlements and the occupied territories...
...The flight of a million and a half Europeans from Algeria was exactly the sort of victory that terrorists seek (the FLN was helped in its project, it should be remembered, by terrorists on the European side...
...the wars go on even when the fighting stops, as if in confirmation of Thomas Hobbes's definition: "For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known...
...For they encourage Palestinians and Israelis to fight the first and fourth wars...
...Winning the second war, for the establishment of a Palestinian state, depends on losing or renouncing the first...
...In 1967, the Arabs were fighting a war of the first kind on my list, against the very existence of Israel...
...The language of incitement— the sermons in Palestinian mosques, the funerals where the "martyrdom" of suicide bombers is commemorated, the slogans shouted at political demonstrations, the celebration of terrorists as heroes in schools run by the Palestine Authority (PA)—makes this intention clear, and it is the explicit goal of the leading terrorist organizations, Hamas and Islamic Jihad...
...Whatever individual terrorists say about their activities, the intention that they signal to the world, and above all to their victims, is radical and frightening: a politics of massacre or removal or of overthrow and subjugation...
...It would strengthen the forces fighting the first war...
...Today, however, if the Palestinians are to win their own independence war, they must acknowledge that Israel's is already won...
...Hence the order of the four wars in my presentation...
...an almost fully connected Palestine (the West Bank and Gaza would still have been separate territories) was at least a possible and even a likely outcome of the ongoing negotiations, whatever was actually offered at this or that moment...
...An international force prepared to use force (and accept casualties) might well bring peace to the Middle East, but I cannot think of any country that is seriously prepared to commit its soldiers to actual battles...
...Arafat's behavior at Camp David and after doesn't suggest a hopeful answer to these questions...
...It was the great mistake of the two centerleft prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin and Barak, not to set themselves against the settler movement from the beginning...
Vol. 49 • September 2002 • No. 4
