Fantasies of Israeli "Realists"
Fein, Leonard
FANTASIES of Israeli "Realists" Wishing the Palestinians would simply disappear, some Israelis talk of their "transfer." LEONARD FEIN Two hours after landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, I am sitting...
...But there is no debate at all regarding the fact that Israel's ad hoc policy was to encourage it...
...Since neither of these is an acceptable solution to more than a tiny number in Israel, you move to the third choice: You convert fantasy into policy, you get rid of the people—transfer...
...Some contend, for example, that fertility data are notoriously volatile, that the feared Palestinian majority is at this point only an unreliable projection, hardly an adequate basis for fateful national decisions...
...Perhaps, the thinking went, we can make things good enough so that a new and more moderate leadership will emerge, a leadership we can talk to, negotiate with...
...And then, if I have to, I will push then-harder...
...Who put an end to this emigration...
...Americans arrive filled with the latest headlines: two wounded here, three killed there, chaos, hatred, wailing mothers...
...The idea of transfer would appear to have come to the general agenda thanks to extreme right-wing leader Meir Kahane, who has long been its sinister advocate...
...But it is no better, either, since there is no good reason to regard it as any more than wishful thinking...
...And yes, the outrageous is bi-directional: The "stones" are sometimes cinder blocks and sometimes knives...
...These are the choices and there's no way around them, not for the left, not for the right, not for the doves, not for the hawks...
...since young girls still walk alone without fear well after dark...
...Administrative detainees may be held for up to six months, and then another six, and another, indefinitely...
...So instead, it removes the moderates, and then pleads—quite credibly, if with monumental chutzpah—that there's no one to talk with...
...For then you are required to ask what other loopholes they may have in mind...
...As loopholes go, it's no worse than those of the right...
...Can we be certain that 10 or 20 years from now, if the problem remains unresolved, the focus will not have shifted to the 1947 borders...
...But it is not just that the times have changed...
...Going through the pain of a non-angry divorce, each partner wishes the other would simply disappear, would (painlessly, of course) suddenly cease to exist...
...Kahaneism with a human face...
...The other, which may have already begun, requires a steady hand, a strong stomach and an apathetic public...
...Most of my friends, united in their dismay and in their gloom, have opted for disengagement: "Internal yeridah," it is called...
...Another argues—it is an argument one hears here with disturbing frequency—that Ariel Sharon wants to be Israel's de Gaulle...
...Hardly anyone here is prepared to apologize for the early precedents...
...And can you actually believe that the United States will sit idly by as we act out your logic...
...A friend has brought to share a book he has just finished reading, Alistair Home's A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1961...
...since one cannot live with despair, and since people are so bitterly divided...
...There are many who believe that if, in its first weeks, Ariel Sharon had been in charge of that response, the intifada would long since have ended...
...The intifada suits Israel's Gandhis and their followers...
...And underlying all of it, there is the one terribly unpleasant fact that immobilizes the Israeli left: The Arabs really do want the Jews out of here...
...Others concede that only Sharon could carry the country on this issue, but dismiss the notion that it is what he has in mind...
...I know how "American" such observations can be, how distant from the patios and the fruit and the flowers...
...The Palestinians would be delighted if all of Israel's Jews were to move away...
...He adds up the hints that Sharon is ready to abandon his support for what is here called "the Greater Land of Israel" and for Gush Emunim, its most zealous advocate, and to move toward a negotiated compromise with the Palestinians...
...The loophole is in the form of a deus ex machina: The United States, and maybe Russia, too, will save us from all this, will finally lose patience and impose a peace upon us...
...But neither the power of positive thinking nor even a booming economy is likely to reverse the dismal pattern of Jewish migration of the last 100 years...
...for it to work, it must never be revealed, never be seen as more than the latest in an ad hoc series of measures, each of which is merely an unfortunate response to the latest episode of stone-throwing or what have yoi And after the intifada, there is ever an end to ii the harassment can co.n tinue, for one can alway find a sufficient excuse fo today's new modest act o repression...
...A tragedy, of course, but war is filled with tragedy, and this particular tragedy would finally solve the larger problem, leave Israel secure, democratic and Jewish...
...One encounters and speaks with them in circles of polite company, and their arguments are ever so orderly, so rational...
...There is a debate over the number...
...I will invite then to leave, and I will even pay them to leave But if they don't want to leave, I will pus...
...But that is not a serious proposal...
...State against...
...tomorrow...
...Fracture that resolve, and you will inherit a whirlwind...
...Gandhi's heavy-handed racist logic will not persuade the Jews of Israel, but their profound frustration may lead them to close their eyes long enough for it to happen...
...But there is, this time, one thing that is new—quite new...
...But today it is the Palestinians whose hate is your enemy...
...If you do not grant them citizenship, you have ended Israel's democracy, surely, withal, its most stunning achievement...
...How shall the government and the army respond to the intifada...
...All this seems so obvious, so obdurate, that one is tempted to impute fanatic blindness to those who say "yes" to a democratic Jewish state but say "no" to Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza...
...So fantasy is a special comfort...
...The Palestinians will not disappear, of course—but here is the chink in the symmetry: Under certain circumstances, their transfer may not be fantasy...
...It is the matter of' 'transfer," a word that entered the Hebrew vocabulary just before the last election, and will surely soon, if it has not yet, become a transitive verb, I'transfer (to transfer), trinsfarnu (we have transferred), and so forth, meaning a specific form of transfer, meaning to move the Arabs out...
...The intifada has given rise to an ongoing restlessness, the redivision of Jerusalem to an active dismay...
...Tel Aviv is not a Paris to which the pieds noirs can retreat, for these Algerians want Paris, too...
...one can always find a sufficient excuse for today's new modest act of repression...
...And one can issue endless noxious regulations because the territories are under military government, its rules subject only to procedural and not to substantive review by the High Court of Justice...
...We are not their benefactors...
...There are such people, and their insistent argument, another loophole, holds that once things settle down, once there is a permanent solution, yeridah—Jewish emigration—will stop, and significant aliyah—Jewish immigration—will begin...
...If you keep the land, you have to figure out what to do with those people...
...And there is also this: In the America that fought its civil war 120 years ago, in the America that is not surrounded by hostile black nations, in the America where black people amount to less than 12 percent of the population, the nation's life is poisoned still by the unresolved relationship between black and white...
...No one with whom I have spoken in Israel, in or out of government, doubts that transfer plans in time of war have been prepared...
...Gandhi's only mistake is to announce harassment as policy...
...There is no talk of the intifada...
...the threat of it would surely provoke powerful public pressure for the disenfran-chisement of its members...
...Remove Egypt from the conflict, and the other pieces will soon enough fall into place: next Lebanon, then Jordan, then the noncontiguous enemies, finally Syria, then peace...
...We have numerous memoirs and histories, among them those of Yitzhak Rabin, erstwhile Labor prime minister and now minister of defense, that describe in detail the wartime efforts, with the explicit approval of David Ben-Gurion, to foster Arab flight...
...But neither the Labor government that ruled from 1967 to 1977, nor the Likud government that was in power from 1977 to 1984, nor the government of national unity that institutionalized immobility from 1984 to 1988, nor the new Likud-Labor coalition government, has sought to nurture these potential interlocutors...
...Destroy the Jewish state, or destroy its democracy, or get rid of the Palestinians...
...Menachem Begin believed it, and during the election campaign I heard Moshe Arens, once Israel's ambassador to the United States, once defense minister, now foreign minister, say it again...
...Yet one understands the need to cling to it, since this is so beloved a land, and so racked with pain...
...Because we created in the area a positive magnet...
...Or, more precisely: The government of Yitzhak Shamir knows full well that what it is at best prepared to offer is so far from anything even the most moderate Palestinian would be inclined to accept that there is no point, save the cosmetic, in talking...
...Reject the first two and you're left with the third...
...Today, for example, the debate is about the 1967 borders...
...And the Americans want it...
...Why should it not promise, as well, this benefit...
...what lessons the Americans learned in Vietnam we learned in Lebanon, or should have learned...
...After the intifada, the harassment can continue...
...We did...
...There is already a new party, Moledet— "motherland," more or less—with just a one-item platform: Israel is for Jews...
...The intractable demographic statistics should make, at least, for a coherent national debate...
...Sooner or later, there will be a self-governing Palestinian community (a state, in plainer words) on the West Bank and in Gaza...
...Only the visitor looks up when there is the sound of an explosion...
...In its 600 pages, he has found terrifying parallels to the conditions that here prevail—and no Charles de Gaulle on Israel's horizon, on either side of the divide...
...And do you truly suppose that the Palestinians will get up and go, they whose ties to the land are so intense, they whose songs of Jerusalem are no less haunting than yours, they whose poems of longing call to mind your own exilic literature...
...Wrong, say the hawks, defeatist: If we had listened to the "realists" a hundred years ago, or even 50, there would be no Jewish state today...
...Do not delude yourself that the strength of our nation rests solely on its military might...
...It is not left to the visitor to rebut their cruel logic...
...No one I know in Israel doubts that transfer plans in time of war have been prepared...
...The quiet is stunning, and I refrain from observing that a mile or two away, stones are being thrown (as the television news will later in the evening confirm), people are being taken away to administrative detention or to be expelled from the country...
...Until the intifada began, there was much talk, induced by America, about improving the quality of life in the territories...
...Ironically, its leader is a retired general known throughout the country by his nickname, Gandhi, a name he earned as a youngster not by virtue of his belief in nonviolent resistance but because he was so thin and his eyeglasses so round...
...The Jews would be pleased if the Palestinians would disappear, failing that, some— perhaps most—Jews are prepared to push them out...
...After all, holding on to the territories and all those Palestinians also means chaos ^nd attendant tragedy—look at the intifada—without the corollary benefit...
...In war or in enduring intifada, transfer, called by a less provocative name (relocation...
...Once before we fought a war without a national consensus, and we lost that war...
...In the first months of the intifada, many Israelis were confused...
...the war is not only about Damascus, it is also and principally about Nablus and Hebron...
...I need not introduce my American perceptions or ask my American questions for the conversation to turn quickly to "the situation...
...Doom...
...The theory, they hold, was valid...
...For now, the election proposal, riddled with contingencies as it is, remains the only game in town, and it brings a measure of relief, since a piece of that game must necessarily be played in faraway Tunis...
...All this seems so blatant that one understands immediately the new slogan of the left—"to be free of the territories...
...they pander to fantasy and hasten the time of doom...
...Some loophole...
...Retired general Rechavam Z'evi—the "Gandhi" of the pro-transfer party—puts the matter quite directly: ' 'When we entered Lod and Ramleh [in 1948], and they raised white flags and surrendered, the order we received from the commander of the operation, Yitzhak Rabin, was to expel the Arabs...
...The Jews will defeat the demographic problem on its own terms...
...The enemies in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan are stuck, and there are real risks in every direction they might move...
...A weak argument with no supporting evidence in the public record...
...Until the intifada, it was the favorite illusion of planners here that Israel's deadly ..struggle was with the neighboring Arab states alone...
...Safer to suppose that those on the other side are as smart as you are, and know everything that you know...
...The birth rate of the Palestinians is high...
...Coming back to Israel is like returning to a conversation after having left the room for a few minutes...
...Israeli withdrawal to enhance Israeli security...
...Under its violent conditions, one can easily create a "negative magnet...
...But this time I am mistaken...
...I was here not long ago when he planted the trees whose fruit we now eat, and the flowers that blossom heavily around us...
...There are two ways to get rid of the Palestinians without appearing to have adopted their expulsion as state policy...
...Today, it is the PLO with which Israel is called upon to deal...
...them...
...Your problem is not in your analysis, but only in your cowardly refusal to draw the appropriate conclusion...
...some, perhaps most, would be ready to force such a move...
...That is the symptom...
...And fighting yet another war without using the opportunity to resolve the problem only insures that after that war is over, there will be still more wars to fight...
...No one truly believes that the status quo (whatever, in these dismal and explosive times, that means) can be indefinitely sustained...
...The status quo here is pocked with the outrageous: broken hands and heads, demolished houses, deportation...
...And, in any case, now that we've been here 20 years and there's no end in sight, it's the right thing to do...
...The longer Israel defers that day, the less control Israel will have over the terms under which it comes to pass...
...In calculating the costs and benefits of the next war, the stout of heart can imagine that it nets out, or could, as opportunity...
...There's another fix, to be sure, a harder fix...
...For the time being, it is likely that most Israelis would endorse such a transfer if they could be assured, both by their own leaders and by the Palestinian leadership, that their security would not thereby be compromised...
...We asked why, and he said, 'It's an order from the Old Man.' The Old Man was Ben-Gurion...
...Some status quo...
...Don't they realize that their standard of living is far higher than that of the Arabs in the surrounding countries...
...We are a people and this is a place filled with surprises, and the wise course is to wait, to muddle through until in some now still unforeseen way, we can have both our motherland and our morality...
...that is how wars are to be fought and peace pursued...
...Why wait passively for opportunity to knock...
...Israeli withdrawal not to be nice to the Palestinians, but to get out from under the burden of occupation and to avoid the burden of an indigestible minority population...
...In the last eight years, more Palestinian than Jewish children have been born...
...the conversation here is of causes and solutions...
...Don't they understand that they're better off in every way than their kinfolk across the several borders...
...LEONARD FEIN Two hours after landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, I am sitting on the patio of my cousin's house in Ramot, a new suburb of Jerusalem...
...the native knows that on the next hill there is new construction under way...
...after all, the purpose of Israel's war in Lebanon in 1982, so stated by the general who was in charge of it (Rafael Eitan) and the defense minister who conceived it (Ariel Sharon), was to destroy the PLO and thereby render the West Bank docile...
...others, those who serve in the same reserve units or belong to the same parents' committees, are quick to rebut and refute...
...Inevitably, we are shocked when we find that on most days, most people sit each under his/her vine and fig tree...
...Things that might be an unbearable charge on conscience in peacetime become a sad but forgivable consequence of war...
...it may even be some hundreds of thousands greater...
...As one right wing journalist put it in easy conversation, "Fc prefer not to hurt them...
...Since, in any case, another war here is more likely than not, why not assign someone the task of figuring out just how, during the course of the next war, masses of Palestinians might be "induced" to flee...
...It is you who speak of demography, you who speak of the impossibility of a bi-national state...
...Has this not been as benign an occupation as history has known...
...transfer the Palestinians...
...Last fall, among the 9,000 Palestinians Israel held prisoner, 2,400 were administrative detainees, charged with no crime and subject to no trial...
...And perhaps, just perhaps, the fierce American pressure that finally caused Shamir to propose elections on the West Bank and in Gaza will be sustained, the PLO will accept the idea of elections, the modalities will be agreed to, the elections will happen, and, as Shamir's critics on the right correctly contend, the road to Palestinian statehood will have been embarked upon...
...It wouldn't have been a pretty ending, but it would have been decisive...
...The simpler of the two rests heavily on Israeli experience and precedent...
...There is no easy solution here, and likely no good solution...
...You speak wistfully of America and its" Indians, and wish the times would still allow the "clean" solutions that made things so easy for the American colonial settlers...
...But the intifada has made it clear that a comprehensive peace between Israel and its neighbors that does not include a settlement of the conflict with the Palestinians is not a comprehensive peace...
...And many fall victim to the iron law of evil: That which was yesterday outrageous is today conventional...
...There is the land, and there are the people who dwell therein...
...can we be certain that in ten or twenty years, if the problem persists, it will not be the Moslem fundamentalists with their call for a holy war against all of Israel...
...No, not all of us, but enough to break the policy...
...So if there's to be a war to end all wars here, know well the names of your adversaries...
...Those who want to talk must therefore want to talk with the PLO, and that brands them as "leftists," a term of opprobrium that removes them from the mainstream debate...
...But there is no end to cleverness here, so there are those who claim to have found one loophole or another in the argument, a loophole that will permit retention of both the land and people and yet preserve a democratic Jewish state...
...It is illogical that we should be subsidizing their continuing presence when it is that very presence that is the problem...
...They are right about fertility statistics, but their comforting conclusion is entirely irrelevant...
...My cousin needs to be reassured that despite what Jewish history appears to teach and too many Palestinians insist, no one will, because no one can, take his patio from him...
...The first: In 1948-1949, during Israel's War of Independence, some hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled their land...
...Of the 14 million Jews in the world, less than 4 million are in Israel...
...If you grant them citizenship, the Jewish state is done...
...you have backed into a bi-national state, or, more precisely, into the very "secular, democratic state" that the PLO once had as its announced goal...
...Soon you're up to speed...
...called by no name at all, appears to offer a quick fix to the demographic problem...
...Our wars and our roadblocks are not a thousand miles away, but across the next hill...
...He means the schools and the universities and the medical care and the electrical power that the Israelis, eager to prove themselves good occupiers, provided or enabled...
...Instead, the word "demography" is suddenly on the lips of Israel's Jews, and it is the consciousness, at last, of the "demographic problem" that has brought "transfer" to polite conversation...
...And later, when evening falls and a group of my cousin's friends drop by to visit, the conversation continues...
...Our strength is an equation, and the variables of that equation include not only the quality of our arms and the skill of our fighters, but also the health of our economy, and the texture of our international relations, and, most of all, the resolve of our people...
...More: Imagine that somehow that pressure is resisted, that the humanists among the hawks in Israel will be party neither to the odium of transfer nor to the odium of disenfranchise-ment...
...There is, however, a loophole on the left, too, a way out of the despair in whose grip it mostly lives...
...The difference between hawks and doves on this one is that the hawks are not yet ready to concede the point, while the doves are unwilling to make Israel's foreign policy hostage to the prospect of large-scale aliyah from the West...
...For now, "it's out of our hands...
...In the chaos of war, people flee...
...Imagine, against the background of the endless war between Jews and Arabs, an Israel with (proportionately) three times as many Palestinians as there are black people in America...
...It is of the prospect of elections in the territories, of the hollowness of Israel's peace policy, of negotiations with the PLO, of Labor and Likud...
...Israeli withdrawal to put an end to the burden of governing a people outside the rule of law...
...without appearing to have adopted their expulsion as state policy...
...one can indulge the anger and the insolence and the arrogance of the Israeli troops who are daily subjected to extreme provocation...
...Is that where you want to take us again...
...One terribly unpleasant fact that immobilizes the Israeli left: The Arabs really do want the Jews out of here...
...you have chosen South Africa as your model...
...the intifada is a fact of life, and may well remain a fact until its causes are addressed...
...Will our children and their parents not see what is happening, and rise up against it...
...It goes by several names: territorial compromise, or land for peace, or, classically, partition...
...One can close the universities for three months or for six, one can have twice as many or ten times as many roadblocks and take twice or ten times as long to examine papers there...
...Today, everyone—including the PLO—accepts that Palestinian sovereignty will be restricted in key respects, especially with regard to its military capacity...
...The forecast is that the next war will involve heavy civilian casualties, a cost that Israel has thus far been spared...
...Today, Uncle Tom has at last become Nat Turner...
...On the West Bank, there are other Palestinians whose readiness to compromise is considerably greater than that of their fellows in Tunis or Damascus...
...And how do you imagine that through all this the people, our people, will hold together...
...And you on the left agree that it is their presence that is the problem...
...But between today and tomorrow, there's my cousin's patio with its flowers and fruit trees, and, not far away, Ahmed's too...
...The difference between hawks and doves is that in order to get rid of the Palestinians, the doves are ready to get rid of the land on which they live, to disgorge the West Bank and Gaza, whereas the hawks are not...
...Safer, in this context, to ask whether there is any way other than a policy of population transfer—caravans of trucks and buses in the middle of the night—that might convert the fantasy of the vanished adversary into a reality...
...Ahmed needs to know that despite what Gandhi and the subtler Gandhis say, and despite what the Israelis have done and do, he may one day soon raise the flag of his choosing over his home, his city, his land...
...In this country, a voting bloc of 38 percent is enough to hold the political system hostage...
...There are at least two ways to do the thing, to get rid of the Palestinians (and if those on the West Bank and Gaza, why not those who live within Israel's borders at the same time...
...Let them make their own electricity, draw their own water, provide their own medical services...
...It is the brilliance of the right here that its plans operate in the margins where the nation is hesitant, where resolve isi lacking...
...Together with the 780,000 Arab citizens of Israel, they make up at least 38 percent of the population between the Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea, that land mass that some Jews call "Greater Israel" and some Arabs call "Palestine," the land mass that includes what the rest of the world knows as Israel and the West Bank and Gaza...
...if only the others would come, as Zionism predicted they would and insisted they should, no problem...
...The transfer of the land...
...But listen again to Gandhi: "Between the War of Independence and the Six-Day War, between 40,000 and 60,000 residents emigrated from Judea and Samaria (the Greater Israel movement's preferred terms for the West Bank) every year...
...That is why he goes to do his reserve duty, and why his sons and daughters go to the army when they come of age...
...And then there is the other way, the way that may already have begun...
...Whenever the Jewish masses have had occasion to vote with their feet, they have voted against the Jewish state...
...Here is the demographic problem: In the West Bank and Gaza, there are roughly 1.7 million Palestinians...
...The Jews may decide to muddle through, but there is scarcely reason to believe the Palestinians will, or that the rest of the world will be idle...
...Today, it is the Palestinian whose demands are your challenge, whose grievances fuel the interstate conflict...
...Some projections suggest that if Israel retains control of the West Bank and Gaza, sor if, as those on the right sometimes urge, Israel annexes these territories, there will quite soon be a Palestinian majority in this, the Jewish state...
...Gandhi exaggerates, but there's just enough to the history he cites to confuse the current debate...
...Now it is too late...
...The question does not shock...
...But there are clever people here, and it is self-indulgent to dismiss the Greater Israel types as willful defiers of stubborn facts...
...That didn't work, to be sure, but there are those here who believe that the only reason it failed was the faint-heartedness of the Israeli public...
...Of such fantasy is the idea of transfer born...
...The conversation swirls about, threads dropped more often than drawn tight, and it is hard to know whether there is more urgency to what is being said than there was a year ago, or 10, or even 30...
...Those in Israel who speak such words are not frothing fanatics...
...Name any senior commander of the Israel Defense Forces in the past, and I will tell you the part he played in transfer during our wars...
...Back home we have been talking about this problem for many years...
...There is debate as to just how large the number was, and there is some debate regarding the reasons for their flight...
...Nor is anyone surprised when I wonder out loud whether there are not those who, having come so far, are inclined to take the next, small step, to plan how the in-any-case-inevitable war shall begin, and when...
...For if there is, rest assured that it's been thought of, that somewhere in a planner's desk the detailed notes have been prepared...
...But that is a misleading etiology...
...For even if the proportions were somehow to remain at their current levels—62 percent Jews, 38 percent Palestinians—the prognosis for the democratic Jewish state would be gloomy, indeed...
...Must there not finally come a point at which even the United States, so indulgent all these years, will say "no" to us and mean it...
...Fantasy: A land without a people for a people without a land, the old Zionist slogan...
...We live in a land where the kids in the army come home on Shabbat with their dirty laundry...
...But set all that aside, fight muscles with muscles and logic with logic: Do you truly believe that even if you succeed, the war will be over, or will you have ensured instead a new phase in a hundred-year war...
...since it is unbearable to think that all the sweat and the blood and the love will have been for naught...
...In the background, the moral argument: The Palestinians, too, have claims and rights, and how can we, of all people, contemplate a program of expulsion by whatever name it's called or means it's implemented...
...And suppose they do: Will they then not sulk their way back to their own militant Zionism, a Katyusha in one hand and a letter of support from the nations of the world in the other...
...since so much has been accomplished here...
...the United States is not, after all, surrounded by Indian nations of vastly greater size and larger population...
...But the Jews will not move, and the Palestinians cannot force them to...
...If transfer is too crude and war too terrible, perhaps you can simply make life so utterly miserable for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza that they will leave of their own volition...
...But for now, as for decades past, the leaders do not lead...
...For though neither can destroy the other, they may well bring ruin upon both their houses...
...Now, as any Palestinian who might be a suitable participant in a negotiated solution is arrested, and some deported, there is no avoiding the conclusion that the government simply doesn't want to talk, doesn't want to talk because it has nothing to say...
...In the early years, the studied repression of Palestinian voices stemmed from the conviction that peace could be negotiated only between states...
Vol. 14 • December 1989 • No. 7
