On Israel's Borders
GOODMAN, WALTER
Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN On Israels Borders EVERYBODY knows that Israel has a border problem. The problem, in a nutshell, is too many borders and not enough Israel. There's nothing like seeing...
...A binational state being neither a Zionist ideal nor a political reality, solutions are elusive...
...All in exchange for peace with Egypt...
...For now, they live in a sort of limbo, suspect in the view of many Israelis and contaminated in the view of many Arabs...
...All this constitutes an oasis of reason amid nationalist and religious passions...
...As for "autonomy," the word is no better defined today than it was at the Camp David signing...
...Israeli spokesmen, some of them a touch embarrassed by what is going on, maintain that tough actions against PLO sympathizers, broadly defined, are necessary to give a chance to the majority of Palestinians to cooperate in progress toward "autonomy...
...The Arabs Without IF THERE IS anything amusing about the situation in the Middle East, it is the enthusiasm with which the Arab powers support the PLO, as long as it does not operate too close to home—Arab homes, not Israel's...
...Although a truce reigned on the Lebanese border, the common feeling was that if the Israeli military did not act today, they would have to act tomorrow...
...The Begin regime's discrimination against Israeli Arabs and its suppression of the Palestinians add no credit to the principles on which Israel is built...
...Before the 1967 War, such positions, exemplary observation points for an expanse of Israeli territory, were held by the Syrians, the most intransigent of Israel's enemies...
...Their presence on Egyptian soil, or sand, was intolerable to Cairo...
...If they are accepted as citizens, however, with all the political rights now enjoyed by Israeli Arabs and with a much higher birthrate than the Jews, what will happen to the idea of a Jewish State...
...But, as ever, the country is at war, and even in that uncivil circumstance, its treatment of potential enemies is more benign than Moslem dissidents can hope for in any Moslem state...
...Still, the settlements created out of the desert have been disbanded, the oil fields that would have assured Israel's energy needs for years given up, the airfields and other military installations that provided security against the most important Arab state dismantled...
...Whatever one's sympathies for the Palestinians, it becomes instantly and dramatically clear to the new visitor that wherever the Israelis have settled, they have built, developed, produced, finding remarkable ways to salvage the land, capture the waters, harness the sun...
...Every crackdown by the Begin regime has been met with opposition in the Knesset, in the press, in the streets...
...In a region of closed societies, Israel remains open to a degree that rivals and in some ways surpasses our own...
...The Arabs Within IN THE ARAB town of Jatt, we talked with several school teachers who complained of discrimination against them by the Israeli establishment...
...The Israelis are near-unanimous in opposing any PLO-run Palestinian state on the West Bank—but that only sets the issue...
...Yet, can they be brought into the mainstream as long as their brothers throughout the Arab world are at war with Israel...
...Can a democratic state exist with such an anomaly...
...At a meeting with Foreign Minister Yitzchak Shamir, I asked how the Begin government saw the long-term resolution in the West Bank...
...Whether this bargain, made with a ruler who was assassinated for his efforts, will prove a good one for Israel depends now on an Egyptian President who would rather not be assassinated—and on the U.S., whose interests in the Middle East are not confined to Israel...
...We visited the Gaza Strip during a time of tension over harsh measures by the Israeli occupation forces reacting to agitation by Palestinian refugees...
...We crossed into Lebanon through the "good fence" used by Lebanese with jobs in Israel or in need of medical attention, and met with Major Sa'ad Haddad, the Lebanese Christian whose 2,000-man Army, financed by Jerusalem, serves as a buffer between Israel and the PLO forces...
...But to get back to those borders...
...They transported us to all parts of the small country, introducing us to a variety of opinions, not counting those of the Palestinian refugees...
...After earning degrees in science or sociology at a university, they had been consigned to the low-status job of teaching in Arab schools...
...Since being driven out of Jordan in 1970, the PLO has managed to shatter Lebanon...
...These days Israelis joke wryly about how long it will take the Egyptians to turn the Israeli-made gardens in the Sinai back into a desert...
...We visited Israeli settlements there, in the areas once known as Samaria and Judea, where some 800,000 Palestinians live as a sort of occupied nation...
...Haddad may be just another Third World military hustler or he may be bloated with grandeur— he is said to think of himself as the de Gaulle of Lebanon—but he is apparently giving the Israelis good value for their money...
...It is an explanation that evokes uncomfortable memories of other occupation forces in other periods and climes...
...Despite the existence of a politically potent ultra-Orthodox minority bound to medieval practices, the country is a fount of innovation...
...In the years between 1948-67, when the lands now occupied by Israel were held by the Arab countries, there was no international outcry for a "home" for the Palestinians...
...The inevitable stifling of opinion and restrictions on daily life feed discontent among the occupied, which in turn feeds anxiety among the occupiers—and here comes another crackdown...
...The Labor Opposition, although agreeing that no Palestinian state can be tolerated in the present territory of the West Bank, parts from the Begin line that not an inch of the historical lands can be given up...
...It is easy for the occupier to see his subjects as an inferior breed, to interpret every sign of discontent as a security threat, and to respond with available force at the clenching of a fist...
...Such power is always a temptation to ruthlessness...
...It was my first visit...
...He responded only with the hope that given five years of "autonomy," some sort of "federation or confederation" could be worked out that would offer the Palestinians substantial self rule, something different from either incorporation into Israel or a state of their own...
...Yes, the Zionists were wise to let the land work its spell...
...Former Labor Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin outlined for us, again in a vague way, a proposal that would put a portion of the West Bank, along with the bulk of the Palestinians, under Jordanian control (where they were before the 1967 War), leaving to Israel most of its settlements and the territorial security they provide...
...Among all the achievements of Israeli agriculture, nothing can match the Jewish State's crop of diverse opinions...
...Their strategy was simple—to make this withdrawal so uncomfortable politically that withdrawal from the West Bank would become unthinkable...
...Since World War II, people who cooperate with the occupiers of their land have been known as Quislings...
...At the Golan Heights, lately annexed by Israel in what critics of Prime Minister Menachem Begin's style consider a needlessly provocative gesture, we prowled about an Israeli bunker, oneof several designed to hold back for a day or two any attack from Syria...
...Their unenviable condition is tied to the much disputed future of the West Bank...
...We visited the town of Yamit, in the Sinai, as the last Jewish settlers were moving or being moved out, in pursuance of the Camp David agreements...
...Not a novel point, yet a basic one that needs periodic reiteration...
...It is a truism that as long as these citizens feel themselves to be outsiders in their own country, discontent will fester, particularly among intellectuals...
...the kid who threw it has a career ahead as a pitcher for the PLO Patriots...
...If there exists an Israeli who is inclined to give up the Golan again prior to the appearance of the Messiah, we did not encounter him...
...I went as a friendly critic and returned with my feelings of friendship enhanced and my critical tendencies somewhat chastened...
...Nor were there any efforts at cultivation that can match what Israel has accomplished since 1967...
...That once-democratic state where Moslems and Christians lived more or less tolerably together also enjoyed peaceable relations with Israel, but its government was too weak to resist a takeover by the PLO and its Syrian patrons...
...A stone shattered a window of our bus...
...For the American visitor its lack of ceremony and irreverence toward authority reminds one of an earlier America, less entangled in the trappings of power...
...Not that it requires a visit to reach that position...
...Those who live on the northern border need all the protection they can get from terrorist incursions...
...Farms in Jordan have adopted some of the ingenious agricultural methods used in the kibbutzim, and Israel invites Jordan's participation in its visionary plans for turning the Dead Sea into a great solar pond...
...The Zionists, considerate hosts, did not assault us with heavy preachments—no brainwashing, at most a rinse or two...
...If one can separate the geopolitical considerations of the hour from the values America is presumably dedicated to, then in all the Middle East it is surely Israel that holds the deepest claim to our com inued support, admiration and affection...
...Such a solution remains highly problematic, given the careful game being played by King Hussein, who is publicly committed to a Palestinian state, yet maintains less public contacts with Israel, and in all circumstances is determined to protect his precarious throne...
...There's nothing like seeing such a nutshell for oneself, and I had the opportunity to do that a few weeks ago, along with a group of journalists on a 10-day visit, subsidized in part by the American Zionist Federation...
...From here Syrian riflemen could make life hot for Israeli settlers in the plains directly below...
...Are those hundreds of thousands of Arabs to be kept indefinitely within the boundaries of Israel as a subject people...
...Those who remained were in large part people who had come to the area only within the past few months, not to settle but to protest...
...Military occupation is no healthier for the moral condition of the occupiers than for the physical condition of the occupied...
...There was no talk of "autonomy...
...It would be astonishing if there were no sympathy for a Palestinian State and for the PLO and its more adventurous offshoots among Israel's Arabs...
...Emotions are always at the boil, and during our visit Israeli administrators, troops and settlers were stoking the fires...
Vol. 65 • April 1982 • No. 8
