Israel Courts Its Neighbors

...The Israel-Lebanon border has been far less quiet, though it is arguable that it would have been much hotter over the past 14 years if Israel were not occupying a self-styled "Security Zone" in South Lebanon...

...An authoritative Israeli source, speaking on condition of anonymity, says a "generous" offer has been made to Assad...

...As a liaison for the Army spokesman's office, Bar-On accompanied an American journalist to Rashidiye, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, during the war there in 1982...

...It would be a reminder to the Palestinians that what they are pleading for now they could have had, on a silver platter, with peace and honor, 52 years ago, 152,000 dead ago, if they had accepted the UN solution in 1947...

...Barak said he did not know about the settlements, and a few days later ordered the evacuation of 15 of them...

...But he hopes that the two can be decent neighbors, and that with the "healing" there will come a time "when Israelis and Palestinians can hop over the border to drink coffee together...

...He is likely to pose the question, says Alpher, in terms implying that a No vote will "condemn the country to war for generations to come...

...But whereas in the early stages there was a clear majority against it, today a clear majority has come to accept the idea, and is willing to have a state" Whatever doubts Israelis may have about the ultimate prospects for a secure peace, Ariel Sharon is obviously taking Barak's referendum declarations seriously...

...Both sides, Oz also told me, should erect a "monument to past stupidity in which they invest equal amounts, with no funding from the Americans...

...There is a need to commemorate these past stupidities...

...Israel had bombed and largely destroyed the camp...

...We found a woman crying," Bar-On recalls...

...News of their identity confirmed for many Israelis a fear that deep in their hearts Arab citizens are not loyal and will identify more with a Palestinian state when it comes into being...

...Estimates for the number of refugees range from 2 million (Israel) to 5 million (the Palestinians), with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency coming in at the median between them, 3.5 million...

...Whether giving them the option to stay put and assume the citizenship of a Palestinian state would be acceptable to Israel has not been explored...

...That is where the encounters with the fundamentalist Hezbollah guerrillas take place, and where over 250 Israeli soldiers have lost their lives since the Zone's establishment in 1985...

...And to the Israelis that they could have spared a lot of their ordeal, and blood and tears, if they had been more imaginative, more pragmatic, more generous, more realistic, after the spectacular triumph in 1967...

...He built a broad-based coalition to bring as much of the electorate as possible under his umbrella while he sought to arrive at a historic accommodation with the Arab world...

...As Israel waits for Assad to get off the fence, and watches Yasir Arafat anxiously to see whether he will be capable of convincing his people that a realistic settlement means they have to give up on some of their dreams, Barak must contend daily with challenges from inside his own government...

...Jerusalem, the Israeli source avers, recognizes that unless President Clinton decides to throw himself personally into the picture, Assad, who could use an infusion of foreign aid to prop up an ailing economy, is unlikely to play ball...

...The Prime Minister thinks his brand of consensus politics will make it possible for him not only to tie everything up by September 2000, but to win the public's approval of the ultimate agreements with the Palestinians and the Syrians in the promised referendum...

...The prominent author and peace advocate Amos Oz, who is eager for a comprehensive conclusion to the Arab-Israeli conflict too, suggests an additional component...

...But the stakes, Alpher observes, "are very high...

...To date, very few have taken up Israel's standing offer of citizenship...

...Because you have to have an end of the conflict...

...A miscalculation that results in the murder by terrorists based in Lebanon of Israeli civilians in the North could lead to escalation that could go beyond the bounds of the Security Zone...

...Alpher, who has participated in a Harvard-sponsored study group that considered various solutions to the refugees' plight, is convinced that, rhetoric aside, "the Palestinians understand there can be no return to Israel proper, and that Barak accepts there will be some return of them to the Palestinian state...

...He proposed that instead the time be used to settle those issues upon which agreement can be reached, "and then defer the rest...

...The morning after he told me that it was reported that the Labor party will be focusing its efforts on preparing the public for a referendum...

...In an unpublished working paper, Yossi Beilin, the current Minister of Justice, and Palestinian Authority official Abu Mazen envisioned the Palestinian capital being established in the suburb of Abu Dis, due east of the Old City...

...The other 151 were set free on October 15...

...Yossi Alpher, the former head of the Dayan Center for Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University who is now director of the American Jewish Committee's IsraelMiddle East office, believes the political dynamic will shortly reorient itself around the issue of the referendum...

...David B. Green, a previous contributor, is an editor of the Jerusalem Report...

...Neither he nor anyone else on the Israeli side whom I have talked to, however, sees granting the Palestinians the right of return as an option Israel can afford to entertain...

...But one price of his approach is constant friction with coalition members over parts of that anticipated compromise...

...Yet while it is clear that Assad wants the Golan Heights restored to Syrian sovereignty, it is by no means apparent that he is interested in peace with Israel...

...Barak is merely the latest of a series of Israeli prime ministers who have signaled to Assad that he can have the Golan back if he offers the right terms...

...The prospects of peace, unfortunately, are always accompanied by demons...

...Bar-On says he remembers the conversation so well because he participated in that battle himself...

...Because both exploded prematurely, fatalities were limited to three of the four terrorists transporting them...

...By not waiting a day to leave the country, Sharon missed delivering the opposition's response to Barak's opening address...

...Nonetheless, much of what falls within the post-1967 municipal boundaries has no historical connection to the traditional Hebrew capital...

...Mordechai Bar-on, who was the chief education officer in the Israeli Army and is a longtime leading Peace Now figure, tells a Lebanon story that illuminates a more vexing problem: The Palestinians' demand of the right of return to their former homes in Israel...

...Ephraim Ya'ar notes that his Peace Index has consistently shown 50 to 60 per cent of the Israeli populace opposes a full withdrawal from the Golan Heights, even if it means a peace treaty with Syria...

...She said, 'Take me to Yazur.'" But even by 1982, Bar-On points out, the village where the refugee woman was born existed only in her memory...

...Another was buried in a bunker...

...He would insist on a resolution by the Arab League declaring its recognition of Israel, and an end to the Arab boycott and to diplomatic campaigning against the state...

...It would be free to approach the border and attack the Northern Israel settlements the Zone was established to protect...

...If you don't solve all the problems, you leave yourself hostage to the radicals...

...Chaim Ramon, the Minister Without Portfolio responsible for overseeing Jerusalem and the peace process, is more reserved on the subject...

...Assuming agreement can be reached on borders, water resources, the fate of Israeli settlements, and even refugees, there is of course still the matter of Jerusalem...

...There remains the political fate of East Jerusalem's 200,000 Arab residents...

...Barak also reiterated his intention to oversee an orderly withdrawal of Israeli troops from Southern Lebanon by July 2000...

...No mainstream Israeli politician will publicly talk about relinquishing sovereignty over any part of it...

...You have to take into account the vision people have of Syria," he explains...

...The disincentive for such behavior, of course, is the devastating counterblow Israel has promised to strike in return...

...political specialists about how best to prepare forthe referendum Prime Minister Ehud Barak has promised to hold that will enable Israelis to approve or reject the peace treaties he hopes to sign with Syria and the Palestinian Authority (PA...

...Noting that the "hour of decision has arrived," Barak urged Syrian President Hafez al-Assad to enter "the door of opportunity...

...But the idea of strategic agreement is too abstract for most people...

...This has been assumed to be especially true since Syria occupied Lebanon in 1991...

...If Israelis needed a reminder of this, it came when two bombs went off almost simultaneously in Haifa and Tiberias on September 5, the day after the Sharm ceremony...

...That's what peace is...

...In their report on their findings the pollsters wrote: "These figures show that despite past experience from the time of the establishment of the State of Israel, indicating that Arab citizens of Israel have had hardly any involvement in hostile actions directed against the Jewish population, the assumption—by default—of the majority of this population is that many Arabs are inclined to identify with such attacks...

...at the same time, some on the Left and the Palestinians attacked Barak for not uprooting the whole lot...

...In its place was a suburb of Tel Aviv called Mishmar Hashivah, named for seven Haganah soldiers who fell in the battle for the village in the 1948 War for Independence...

...Nearly 68 per cent of the respondents thought either a "considerable minority" or "more than half" of all Israeli Arabs supported terrorist attacks...

...Soon after the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement, he told my Jerusalem Report colleague Leslie Süsser, "I don't think we can agree on everything in six months, or even in a year...

...The Syrian leader's perpetual cold feet have left the Israeli public cold too...

...When you have an enemy you don't know much about, it's more frightening, both in individual and collective psychology...

...Although technically Abu Dis is in the West Bank, Palestinians consider it part of al-Quds (the Arabic name for Jerusalem...

...The Iranian-backed and trained Hezbollah has been deliberately ambiguous in its statements regarding how it might react if Israel pulled back in the absence of an agreement...

...Ariel Sharon reportedly was consulting with US...

...He repeated a formula first articulated by the late Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin, who had told Assad publicly that the "depth of withdrawal" in the Golan Heights would be "equal to the depth of peace" Damascus was willing to offer Israel...

...Within days Israel not only carried out the first of three land transfers that will put an additional 11 per cent of the West Bank under Palestinian control by January, but released 199 of a promised 350 Palestinian security prisoners...

...Philosopher and Peace Now leader Avishai Margalit thinks "that Barak, like Rabin, wants a strategic agreement with the Syrians...

...Exactly a month earlier, at a ceremony in Sharm el-Sheikh, he had committed Israel to beginning immediate implementation of the Wye Plantation agreement reached with the Palestinians a year ago...

...BEFORE A REFERENDUM Israel Courts Its Neighbors By David B. Green Jerusalem It is indicative of the way the winds are blowing in Israel that the Likud Party's new chairman was in the United States on October 4, the opening day of the Knesset's winter session...

...Housing Minister Yitzchak Levy, head of the National Religious Party, was responsible for approving at least some of the 42 settlement outposts identified by Peace Now in early October as having been erected "illegally" since the signing of the Wye Memorandum...

...From the beginning of the Oslo process," Ya'ar told me, "a large segment of Israelis took it for granted that a Palestinian state would emerge...

...A meeting with representatives of the Settlers' Council on October 13 eventually led to a compromise by which the settlers agreed to voluntarily leave 10 of the 15, and to move another two back to the original settlements from which they had been spun off...

...The Palestinians want it to be the capital of their state...

...Oz is quick to stress that with the end of conflict, he does not foresee the Israelis and Palestinians beginning to behave like "one big happy family: We are not one, we're not happy, and we're not a family...

...The Arab League," he recalls, "is where the conflict began, in December 1947, when it resolved to prevent by force the creation of a Jewish state...

...It further agreed to a plan for outlining a "final-status" agreement by February, with the details to be completed by next September...

...Alpher goes on to predict that a resolution of the refugee problem will include compensation to families that lost their homes and property, noting that "all Israeli governments since 1949 have agreed on the need for that...

...For about a year, though, the notion of Israel simply withdrawing unilaterally from the Zone has been gaining support among the public and politicians, although not among the Army's generals...

...I asked her if there was anything I could do for her...

...Alpher say s that might just work, since "the Jews don't even know where Abu Dis is...

...Nevertheless, he reportedly keeps increasing the preconditions Israel must accept before he will resume the negotiations broken off in 1996...

...Her husband and two sons were missing...

...Ron Pundik, a member of the initial small team that secretly negotiated at Oslo, who continues to pursue PalestinianJewish reconciliation, maintains that it would be "catastrophic to leave [controversial issues] open...

...Conventional wisdom has always had it that Lebanon would not be the first to make peace with Israel, but neither would it be the last...

...Barak merely declared again in the Knesset on opening day that Jerusalem would remain undivided, under Israeli sovereignty...

...Following the abortive attacks, the director of Tel Aviv University's Steinmetz Center for Peace Research, Ephraim Ya'ar, and his colleague Tamar Hermann polled Israeli Jews to determine how they viewed their Arab fellow citizens...

...It includes a withdrawal to the international border, a little to the east of the vague June 4, 1967, line that Assad insists upon, which would give him control over Israel's water supply...

...The bombers were all Israeli Arabs, members of the country's Islamic Movement, who had apparently been sent on their mission by Hamas...

...It was the first time a settler group had ever agreed to leave a site of its own volition, and the Council came under harsh criticism from others on the Right for capitulating...

...Ironically, adds Ya'ar, "people tend to belittle the importance of peace with Syria because the Syrian-Israeli border has been so quiet...

...Interior Minister Natan Sharansky, leader of the Yisrael B'Aliyah Party, has openly thrown himself behind the campaign to foil a Golan withdrawal...

...Similarly, when Jewish Israelis were asked where they thought the loyalties of Israeli Arabs would lie in the event of the establishment of a Palestinian state, 57 per cent of the respondents said the Arabs would have greater loyalty to a Palestinian state...