From Israel
Eban, Abba
FROM ISRAEL Keeping Israel Jewish ABBA EBAN Why don't we start with the obvious? We are meeting two days after the Sinai withdrawal process has been completed. Instead of charging the batteries...
...After the boundary cut them off, I presume they were Frenchmen living abroad...
...Perhaps it's more accurate to say that the Sinai was relinquished in order to remove Egypt—the one Arab nation that mattered as an adversary— from the conflict...
...Especially since once they have done it, we lose control of how they then exercise their options...
...But will Egypt really agree to have a separate peace, the effect of which is to deliver over the Palestinians to an endless subservience...
...The conditions today are not right for it because they are not negotiating with us...
...Then they, the Israeli Arabs, will be able to settle down and will live their Israeli lives and will have their sympathies with their brethren across the boundary...
...He answered that he could quite easily conceive of it without Shechem, for Shechem, he pointed out, reminds us of the rape of Dinah, the division of the Kingdom, and the sale of Joseph our father...
...Or, at least, the intention to annex...
...There are many similar examples in the European past...
...Belgium: Self-determination does not imply an automatic right of secession...
...They took the Palestinian part literally—the withdrawal of the military administration, its replacement by an Arab self-governing authority, the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, Resolution 242...
...It was ignited by Sadat...
...What do you hear from them about these matters...
...One of the things that weakens what I call "the partitionist case" is that there is no evidence that the United States is at all interested in partition...
...I don't think that the central principle of our policy is the Jordan option...
...Canada: No, self-determinaI've never been through a period when I've heard more reservations about Israel, about the direction of its policy and about the kinds of shadows that it casts upon Jews...
...That isn't just the consequence of the policy...
...I don't see any other motivation for blowing up houses except to conduct a war of nerves...
...I doubt that he would have let this destroy the prospect of a peace treaty...
...Therefore, for the moment, we should preserve the idea in a provisional atmosphere, like a detachment capsule...
...What happened...
...What, after all, would happen if they were to eliminate our complexes by an act like that of Sadat...
...After all, they know the demographic problem as well as the Opposition does...
...The Jordan device is one way of making that option feasible...
...They always reject proposals that are in their own interest, only to endorse them when the proposals have receded from view...
...For example, after the Second World War, France made a boundary correction in the Savoy area...
...The weakness of our position, of the partitionists' position, is that the Likud says, in effect, "All right, you say that world opinion doesn't like our policy, but it doesn't like your policy either...
...And, obviously, it does affect the right of the State to be called Jewish...
...Certainly that isn't the idea of Camp David, where there is a clear chronological linkage between the two governments...
...As the government claims that time is on our side, they've got to look at the fact that we've been there for 15 years now, and that Palestinian opinion, Arab opinion and world opinion are less prepared for us to control the West Bank and Gaza permanently than they were in June of 1967...
...The existing rhetoric would obviously be superseded by a new appraisal...
...Obviously, the Likud recognized that there is, after all, a connection between territory and peace...
...The assumption would have to be that the boundary configuration means that we are not at war any longer...
...Yes, but they are radical not so much on their own behalf...
...they've gone there to change the identity and character of the area...
...I had great respect—almost astonished respect— for him because of that...
...And therefore it's one of the problems about which Diaspora Jews do have a right to express themselves...
...All right, so you had some Frenchmen in Italy, and you had Italian families in France...
...And when the committee was established, we sat together under the chairmanship of the Brazilian delegate, and his first suggestion was that we order coffee...
...So perhaps the media are taking his current reaction to the West Bank and Gaza a little too seriously...
...The historicity is simply false...
...Now that, of course, is what we want to discuss...
...And naturally, you've come into extensive contact with American Jews...
...Programmatically, does Labor have anything interesting to propose regarding the current situation...
...That's an equation that people can't work out...
...It didn't happen principally because there was no national consensus...
...In any event, let's say that there is a Jordanian and Palestinian state of 4.5 million people that includes 25,000 Israelis...
...And that's an effort to delegitimate the opposition, in the name of a doctrine which is, after all, quite peripheral to Zionism, that is not the mainstream of the Zionist concept...
...In other words, it is not an unqualified right...
...But the Camp David agreement doesn't talk about a unilateral Israeli right to determine the permanent status of the West Bank and Gaza...
...In other words, we now face something that cannot be expected to go away...
...Let's imagine that the Alignment policy were carried out, and that the boundaries of Jordan, say, were changed...
...I don't think we need go beyond that at the moment...
...Of what nation were the Frenchmen who remained in Italy citizens...
...That syndrome is repeating itself today...
...The concern is not for the physical survival of Israel, but for its nature and quality...
...It doesn't sound very dramatic, but I believe that it would set our internal debate on the proper course during the months ahead...
...Now, for example, Begin is suggesting that we have engaged in the last territorial act we are going to undertake for the sake of peace...
...But they didn't move...
...Are you concerned by their apparent radicalization...
...Now the logic of what was done in Sinai works against the government's doctrine, because it has proved that there is a connection between territory and peace...
...I have a rather modest ambition to try and freeze the situation in such a way that the option of eventual territorial agreement isn't foreclosed...
...But doesn't that imply something that is repeatedly described as "outside the consensus...
...Perhaps it's a mistake to say that the Sinai was traded for peace...
...I think we would have a strong case if we held that since the boundary movement had taken place in the context of peace, there could be a few Israeli villages under Arab sovereignty...
...I believe that what has to happen now is that the United States should try to reconvene the autonomy talks and challenge the parties to reaffirm the crucial paragraph which says that neither Israel nor Egypt nor the Palestinians nor Jordan has the unilateral right to foreclose the issue of sovereignty...
...they stayed where they were...
...Their public attitudes are dictated by Jewish loyalty, by a feeling which one American Jewish leader expressed to me just this morning that "if we give too much vocal expression to our concern, the Israeli government will take no notice, but the gentile world will use it against Israel...
...The PLO is today recognized by more countries than is Israel...
...There's a tremendous dichotomy between their private discourse and their public attitudes...
...Unfortunately, that's the history of the Palestine Arabs...
...He then asked whether we agreed that the right of self-determination was unconditional...
...Now, we in the Labor Movement should try to separate the idea of territonal compromise from the idea of removing settlements, so that we don't face the Sinai trauma all over again...
...They are a little bit like the Zionists in New York and Buenos Aires...
...This element of anger and bitterness was introduced, and I'm afraid it was calculated...
...After all, it's entirely possible that Sharon, too, has a strategy for relinquishing the people—albeit not the territory...
...let's analyze the possibility...
...And even if that were desirable, it wouldn't be easy, because however many we put into these new settlements will be overcome*by the natural increase of the Arabs...
...Moving a boundary does not mean the people have to move...
...And even if you create this monstrous idea that there is a linkage between where your nation was born and where you should consummate your present boundaries, you still have a rather chaotic situation, since you can't expect the international system to accept that linkage...
...One would, I suppose, imagine that many of them would prefer their old flag to their new attachment to the particular place where they have settled...
...Is the State passing out of the decisive control of its Jewish commitments...
...I recall that some years ago Professor Ephraim Urbach was asked whether he could conceive of Israel without Shechem...
...In the Charter, it's a principle, and the point is that you must choose the kind of self-determination that is compatible with the security of existing states...
...We can't say that if we simply accept the status quo, the boil will eventually subside...
...I think we should understand the terms in which Begin signed the Camp David accords...
...They are not breathable by any Jewish democratic society...
...It is attractive in terms of our security against the background of a PLO which makes it impossible for us to withdraw...
...They haven't done that...
...And that means that the deadlock does not arise principally because of Israeli attitudes and policy...
...The real question is whether the unilateral Israeli desire—a desire of, let's say, half the Israeli nation—to have permanent control over the West Bank and Gaza can be effective against all the dynamics of objective fact that work in a different direction...
...Such a position would create an impact in the internal debate within Israel...
...After all, the country is not in a mood to have anyone probe its wounds today...
...Sharon's view, of course, is different: If you give up territory then you have to smash all that you've created there...
...I haven't seen many who say that they want to be removed from Israeli jurisdiction, that such removal must apply to them as well...
...The other three are Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinians...
...They have made a choice, and that really strengthens the right of the Gazans and the West Bankers to have at least an option that leads them to an Arab destiny...
...How they shall be relinquished is a tactical matter that can change with circumstances...
...it's simply that they are not us and they are not ours...
...The other Arabs don't seem to have understood the magnitude of Sadat's achievement or the fact that it could be emulated...
...The distinction they make is that the West Bank, they say, is where our nation was born...
...So both politics and history are being distorted...
...It is a wounded reaction, and in a few weeks the matter may look rather different...
...But the point is that it wasn't necessary for them to move when the boundary correction was made...
...Yes, I think that Sharon's concept was that the Sinai withdrawal should be so traumatic that nobody would conceive the possibility of repeating it...
...What can the Prime Minister and his associates have in mind in geopolitical terms...
...And what was the reaction of the Likud...
...That is the logic of blowing up the houses and streets...
...From that point of view, the Camp David agreement had a paradox written into it, because the mood and the spirit in which Israel signed were totally different from the mood and the spirit of the other signatories...
...The Jewish Agency was widely viewed as a quasi-government, as "the embryo" of our society, in the words of the Peel Commission as far back as 1937...
...And I sometimes wonder whether, if we had made more of a fight on this matter at Camp David, Sadat would have understood the principle...
...Well, let's suppose that they do it and the way they choose to do it is through statehood...
...Three former chiefs of staff spoke out against it—Bar Lev, Gur and Rabin...
...At the moment, for example, Labor seems stuck on a Jordanian option that does not correspond to any observable reality...
...After it was moved, some Frenchmen found themselves living in Italy and some Italians found themselves living in France...
...And the government's policy is to foreclose it in two ways—juridically, although that hasn't happened yet in the West Bank and Gaza, and physically, by breaking up the consecutiveness of the Arab population...
...Yes, a PLO state isn't even part of the Labor Party policy, let alone the Likud policy...
...But what of it...
...But now we have 120 nations insisting that you can't even have an international gathering without inviting the PLO...
...Yes...
...Now it appears that Begin's concept of Camp David is that all the operative parts of the agreement which deal with withdrawal and compromise, with territorial change, apply to the Sinai and have no application anywhere else...
...Under the terms of the agreement, we are one of four who decide...
...The great vacuum, the great political vacuum these days, is the policy of the United States...
...It was a negative thing to do...
...It is clear to me that the Camp David agreement is not consistent with Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza...
...tion does not give a license for the fragmentation of existing states...
...There was an effort to draw the Labor Party into a consensus for a very major land action and we simply withheld our consent...
...The western powers didn't allow Germany to determine itself in any way it liked...
...In human terms, that ought not really be a great problem...
...Paradoxically, it was introduced into the UN Charter by the Soviet Union...
...Is it conceivable that the Prime Minister genuinely believes what he says when he dismisses that projection as a problem, and claims that it will be redressed by massive aliyah from the West...
...Begin says that it was in Yehuda and Shomron that our people was born, but the fact is that Israel was born as a spiritual community in Sinai...
...And let's presume further that statehood is conditional on some version of the Alton plan, with demilitarization and all the rest...
...The idea that the Jews can only exist in the Middle East where there is Israeli sovereignty ought to be discarded...
...Well, that didn't happen—and it's interesting to ask why it didn't happen...
...It was not necessary to blow them up...
...I would think that for the Likud, the status quo is tolerable...
...Well, I don't see the 100,000.1 see the same few thousand who seem to be transported from one area of demonstration to another...
...And so we continue to rule the Palestinians, incurring all the abrasiveness of a conflict that springs up again and again...
...That doctrine is that the Jewish State should be organized as a unitary structure rather than as a democratic state, and it has been elevated to a principle which it is not legitimate to question...
...One can't accuse him of any inconsistency...
...They must understand that the framework of autonomy provides a path to statehood...
...Doesn't that imply self-determination for the Palestinian people...
...In other words, instead of the Jordan option, we should speak of the principle of partition...
...I don't begin to understand why others don't try a formula which has been so brilliantly successful in the Egyptian case...
...I suppose they would say that the conflict is sporadic, that it's not intolerable, that it doesn't make our life impossible, that it doesn't even create a very special international position, and that people will get used to it...
...And a territory doesn't have to be judenrein just because it is not under Israeli sovereignty...
...We had thought that ours was a record...
...My feeling is that it was part of the trauma of the Sinai withdrawal, that it was a desire to cover the trauma with a screen of virile self-assertion...
...We should avoid closing the options...
...But isn't it a critical tactical matter...
...And it has been successful...
...I don't think there's any other case of a national movement that has achieved recognition on this scale before it achieved effective control of any territory at all...
...They said that the Federal Republic could determine itself only if it was ready to enter the community of nations...
...that is its intention...
...That's a principle that Begin should have fought for much harder in his negotiations with the Egyptians...
...Some of them say they've written letters privately to indicate that they are not happy...
...It's really the business of the Jordanians and the Palestinians to create conditions that would make some Israelis ready for the detachment to take place...
...The Palestinians have rejected our idea of a unified Eretz Yisrael, but they've also rejected your Allon plan and your other options, so let's at least create a consensus on the negative things, the things that we are all against...
...And most of the documents say that if a community merges into another community which is ethnically akin to it, that is self-determination...
...They object to the fact that Israel appears not in its humanistic liberal guise or in its creative aspects but as flexing its muscles in various directions...
...For the present, I don't think we can leap to any permanent solution...
...Or, if not, will it lose its democratic character, which is equally indis-pensible to it...
...That was the last thing we were able to agree on...
...In fact, Begin's most spectacular concession at Camp David was that he removed the West Bank and Gaza from Israel's right of unilateral determination...
...He seems to be plunging ahead to make the facts on the ground irreversible...
...The revolution in Israeli thinking about Sinai didn't spring spontaneously from Israel...
...Isn't that, for all practical purposes, the very PLO state which the Prime Minister repeatedly asserts lies outside the broad Israeli consensus...
...I remember that early in the 1970s, the UN established a study committee on self-determination, charged with defining just what it is we mean by the term...
...I'm quite certain that the more you analyze it, the less viable it will appear...
...It would help restore a sense of legitimacy to serious debate, to serious consideration of options other than the one which Begin and Sharon are today pursuing...
...Each time we talk about these things, the issue of the Labor Party arises...
...They haven't changed their basic ideology, which is that they want to stay in Israel and be Israelis...
...Our central principle is that we do not want to have permanent jurisdiction over these people...
...Our platform speaks of relinquishing the populated areas, not only the population...
...You've been spending a good deal of time in America lately, preparing for your forthcoming television series on the history of the Jewish people...
...After all, the Likud government wrote into the coalition agreement that at the end of three to five years we will exercise our right to apply our sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza...
...And on that principle, you might get quite a rally of people who—for various reasons—believe that it would be a deformation of our statehood and of our Jewishness, of our democracy, of our social structure, to try to breathe into our lungs this territory, these people...
...Except that at the same time, Minister of Defense Sharon does not give the appearance of a wounded man...
...We have to rally opinion behind the principle that in order to maintain a democratic Jewish state we want to avoid closing the option for relinquishing these people and their territory...
...And then the West Bank and Gaza problem would leave us alone...
...Self-determination is a very difficult phrase...
...At Dunbarton Oaks, there had been no reference to self-determination at all...
...That's why I don't think we have to go into a detailed negotiation with ourselves...
...They reject the proposal when it's on the table and begin to yearn for it when it's fallen off the table...
...The assumption was that Israel's duty for territorial concession would be exhausted by the renunciation of Sinai...
...So when you say that the Palestinians should be under Arab and not Israeli rule, that's self-determination...
...The Nobel Prize was not given to Begin as a testimonial for his idea of annexing the West Bank and Gaza...
...The data show that by the year 2000 there will likely be an equal number of Jews and Arabs in "greater Israel...
...He did and said things that made people reading for renunciations that nobody would have thought conceivable even a week before...
...Of course, perhaps one ought not to take that too gravely, because Begin hasn't said anything about the West Bank and Gaza that he didn't say earlier about Yamit and Ophira—namely, that we would give them up over his dead body, that he would resign before giving them up...
...After all, there are hundreds of Arab villages in Israel...
...Palestinian identity has much more reality, much more expression and much more recognition than it did in 1967...
...They are radical because of the paradoxical situation in the West Bank and Gaza...
...Finally, 11 countries agreed to self-determination—provided there's no secession, provided there's no disintegration, provided there's no fragmentation, provided there's no threat to the security of existing states...
...Instead of charging the batteries of peace, the process seems to have depleted them...
...In other words, they use history to create a differentiation between Sinai and the West Bank...
...So they are really tormented by this dilemma...
...The fact that we got peace by giving up territory leads many people in the world to say that if we were prepared to do it in the Sinai, we should be prepared to do it somewhere else—albeit perhaps not to the same degree...
...If you are going to give something up, you might as well put a good face on it, and make of it a dignified transfer...
...He said there that we alone cannot decide...
...Obviously, they, too, are undergoing a transformation these days—and a very disturbing one, in certain respects...
...The question I hear is how Israel will emerge, if it has to be responsible not only for three to four million Jews but for nearly two million Arabs...
...In other words, when you give up a territory for whatever reason, and you move the boundary for the sake of that reason, you do not automatically have to move the people...
...Whether or not they choose to express it, I have never been through a period when I've heard more reservations about Israel, about the direction of its policy and about the kinds of shadows that it casts upon Jews...
...These concepts were, after all, very far from what was expected from the Likud government, and so they were greeted with exhilaration...
...The idea was that its membership in the community would blunt its nationalist tendency...
...Or, if they wanted to, they became Italians...
...Now, frankly, I can't possibly understand the historic intuition of a man who says that Shechem means more in the birth of Israel than Sinai...
...It was really too much to inflict on the Israeli people the double trauma of withdrawal and destruction...
...And, to put the matter starkly, Meir Kahane also has a strategy for "relinquishing" the people...
...It certainly safeguards them against unilateral Israeli determination of the future...
...There was, in other words, a time-bomb of ambiguity, and worse, a certain amount of calculated self-deception, and these are now coming home to roost...
...Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State responded to its introduction by screaming that the world would come to a disastrous end, the whole international system would be fragmented, that there are no countries that might not be liquidated or disrupted on the basis of the idea of self-determination...
...And annexation is a fair word to use today...
...This you usually resist...
...Which means that the Jews who are living there at the present haven't gone there to live in friendship and peace...
...The answers were not long in forthcoming...
...I don't know what has happened to the intention to intervene...
...They rejected Bevin's White Paper and the UNSCOP partition and the '67 lines...
...The numbers of people in the Sinai case were surely small enough so that it would have been a much easier case to argue than it will be regarding the West Bank if Sharon succeeds in settling 100,000 people there...
...The other part of the Israeli political spectrum ought to face the challenge...
...Now there is a genuine woundedness, and everyone would be wise to interpose a period of nonintervention...
...And clearly we would have to accept that, because that is exactly what the Camp David agreement says...
...That's a phrase I've never used and never liked, and it doesn't actually occur in any of our documents...
...It would create a new situation were America and some others to say that while they respect Israeli vulnerability, Israel's feeling of insecurity, and, therefore, the right of Israel to have different boundaries, all this must be done in such a way as to minimize the imposition of Israeli rule on Arabs...
...That's why it's crazy that they haven't done it...
...That includes, presumably, Israel's nonintervention in Lebanon...
...They have no other solution...
...And the war of nerves is not against Egypt or the Palestinians, but against the Israeli people...
...They ought to have a destiny separate from ours...
...And who knows what the results would be...
...I believe that it was his design from the very beginning to be flexible about Sinai in order to be immovable about the West Bank and Gaza...
...They have a definite unhappiness about what they call "Israel's image...
...Perhaps it is possible to stay there forever...
...What they fail to understand is that they have far more control of the evolution of Israeli thinking than they give themselves credit for...
...They want the Palestinians to have freedom...
...On our part, we suggest to you that it is in massive disarray...
...But my central view is that we don't have to rally opinion behind the Jordan option...
...He must know that that's not very likely...
...In other words, it was his act of Arab leadership that released new currents of thought within Israel...
...The Soviet Union: Self-determination cannot create a danger to existing states...
...They want the satisfaction that the Palestinians will have a flag and have their own destiny...
...More than most Israeli leaders, you've had occasion to think about the Arabs within Israel, about Israel's Arab citizens...
...Indeed, it shouldn't be a problem even if there are 100,000 Israelis...
...I don't mean that in a racist way at all...
...Nigeria: Self-determination must not affect the unity or the cohesion of existing states...
...The reaction was that we have three chiefs of staff who are protecting the PLO—I think that's the phrase the government spokesman used...
...When people like Jimmy Carter or Callahan praised the Camp David accords, they were praising them for the Palestinian rather than for the Egyptian part...
...And now that the doctrine that we are there to stay forever is openly proclaimed, we can discuss it...
...I think we should stress the principle that it is not the eternal destiny of these Arabs to be outside the Arab world...
Vol. 7 • June 1982 • No. 6
